Jefferson Davis is responsible for much of the appearance of the US Capitol. Perhaps if he had known that he would become the president of the ConfedeJefferson Davis is responsible for much of the appearance of the US Capitol. Perhaps if he had known that he would become the president of the Confederacy, he wouldn't have made this a priority.

Davis pushed for adding additions to the existing Capitol, and in particular championed adding two wings to the building, rather than adding an addition just to the east side. His involvement began with soliciting the thoughts of the Washington architect Robert Mills, who had designed the Washington Monument, in a letter in 1850 when Davis was a senator from Mississippi.

By then the Capitol was in need of enlargement, improvement and repair. As more states entered the union, the House of Representatives was getting crowded. The original Capitol also lacked committee rooms. Besides the House and Senate chambers, the building also housed the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress.

In 1850, the building essentially was unaltered in design from when Charles Bulfinch, a Boston architect, had left in 1829 after he had completed the building and constructed the original dome. However by 1850 it had cracking walls, sagging roofs, and rotten timbers. The Senate chamber was poorly heated in winter. The most pressing problem was that that the chamber of the House of Representatives, although lovely, had terrible acoustics which generally rendered a speaker nearly inaudible, no matter how loudly he shouted, unless you were standing right next to him.

The Capitol had a complicated history of design and construction by 1829. The site, Jenkins Hill, was picked out by Pierre Charles L'Enfant in his 1792 city plan. The building design was also determined in a 1792 design competition. Unfortunately, George Washington, while retaining William Thornton's exterior design, decided to appease runner-up Stephen Hallet by adopting Hallet's design for the interior, which caused some confusion. Construction was supposed to be complete by 1800, and much of what had been completed had to be rebuilt after the British burned it on August 24, 1814. By 1814 the two sides of the building, which contained the House and Senate chambers, had been built under the supervision of Benjamin Latrobe, but the center portion, containing the Rotunda, and where the dome would be located, had not.

Bulfinch was responsible for building the center portion and completing the work on the sides. His dome was actually two domes, a stone interior dome above the Rotunda and an wood and copper outer dome above the inner dome.

Bullfinch's dome had a problem; it was too big in proportion to the rest of the building. Why? Because while his original dome design was correctly proportioned, members of Congress wanted a bigger dome. This incident one of the often unfortunate tendencies of Congress, a love of grandiosity. Unfortunately this tendency could be squared with another tendency, their wish to avoid criticism from voters that they were spending too much. In addition, members of Congress, and members of incoming administrations, typically 1) used investigations or held up funding to embarrass the architect in charge if he had been appointed by the opposing party, or 2) did the same thing in hopes of putting one of their own supporters in the job. These tendencies were partly responsible for the long time needed to finish the original building. Successful architects needed to be able to get along with Congress, as far as that was possible, as well as being skillful in their profession. As the Capitol was a prestigious project, there were always architects willing to have a go at it.

Davis as Senator, then Secretary of War in Franklin Pierce administration, and then again upon his return to the Senate, managed to control these shenanigans, apparently because people were afraid to cross him given his vindictive and unforgiving approach to political matters. He was also hard working and well-informed. Given his well advertised, and apparently sincere given the events of 1860, willingness to advocate succession if he thought the Union was bad for southern interests, the question is why he would bother building the Capitol and engaging in other nation-building activities, such as supporting the Smithsonian and opposing a southern federal military academy. I can only hypothesize that he thought that brinksmanship would be sufficient to avoid the need to ever actually succeed. Unsurprisingly, events such as the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska act and the events resulting from it, did distract the attention of politicians from renovating the Capitol.

Although Robert Mill's basic conception of the addition of two wings was realized in the renovation, he failed to attract the political support to become the architect of the Capitol expansion. Instead, Philadelphia architect Thomas Ustick Walter got the job and managed to hold onto it until completion in the 1860s, working off of Mill's basic conception. Construction began on July 4, 1851. Walter decided to use a white marble to match the coloration of the sandstone of the original building. He was also responsible for the design of a new dome, the old one ironically now being too small as well as a rotting fire hazard. The new dome would be constructed of cast iron, which Walter had become familiar with as a construction material when he was called on to rebuild the Library of Congress, housed in the original building, when their was a fire in the library in 1851 due to failure in a Senate fireplace flue.

Walter was an appointee of the Whig Millard Fillmore, and thus was generally being investigated or denounced by Congress which had a democratic majority during most of the early and middle 1850s. Surprisingly, he survived the election of the Democrat Pierce, though he was demoted. Jefferson Davis managed to get the project transferred to his department, War, from the Interior Department. An engineering officer, Captain Montgomery C. Meigs, was placed in overall charge. Although Davis wanted Walter to go, Meigs at the beginning of his appointment realized that Walter was indispensable and retained him. Davis, who could be fair in professional if not political matters, backed off.

Meigs made changes to the design. Originally the new House and Senate chambers were to be located at one end of each of the new wings; he placed them in the center of the wings. In addition, in order to reduce exterior noise he eliminated windows from the chambers, illuminating them instead principally with large skylights, and devised a mechanical means of heating and ventilation. On the exterior, Meigs added colonnades of monolithic columns to unify the new and old construction, and added pediments to each of the wings.

Meigs also added decorative touches, reasoning that if the artwork was solidly attached to the building he had the authority to do so. The walls had to be painted somehow, no? To that end he hired Constantino Brumidi, originally of Rome, to fresco much of the interior. Brumidi was an amazingly skilled artist, and would in addition, at Walter's behest, paint the concave fresco mural visible through the oculus of the inner dome and suspended from the outer dome.

Meigs and Walter had a falling out in the later 1850s over who should get credit for the work. Meigs, never one to underestimate his abilities, began to take more credit for the design than was his due and had his name added to plans he didn't conceive of. In retaliation, Walter moved his design office and refused to provide Meigs, who supervised the workforce and contractors, with design drawings, and also tried to get Meigs fired. As it happened, Meigs, who had already run afoul of the new Secretary of War in the James Buchanan administration, John B. Floyd, for not playing along with patronage hiring requests, in 1859 was openly insubordinate and was transferred to the Dry Tortugas. Walter's childish refusal to provide design drawings greatly slowed construction, in particular of the dome.

Although Meig's was quickly back in Washington with the advent of the Lincoln administration, he was also quickly shifted first to resupplying federal forts in southern states and then to supplying the Union forces shortly after his return. On December 2, 1863, Walter had dome topped with Thomas Crawford's statue, "Freedom triumphant in war and peace." Brumidi completed the mural for the oculus in 1865.

The author goes into more detail than I have on how the political environment affected the renovation of the Capitol. Also, more architects tried to become the Capitol's restorer than I have indicated here. I think the book could have benefited from more plans of both the original building and the additions; I sometimes had difficulty visualized what author was describing. Also, a list of figures would have been useful. I liked the author's writing style and enjoyed the book.

I suspect that most people wouldn't be interested in the history of a system of measurement. For those who are, John Bemelmans Marciano's book may beI suspect that most people wouldn't be interested in the history of a system of measurement. For those who are, John Bemelmans Marciano's book may be interesting. Marciano actually covers more than the metric system, as measures of time, calendar systems, and especially currency are also discussed.

Currency historically had a direct connection to measures of weight, as ideally a pile of silver coins weighing one pound should also be worth one pound in a monetary sense. This connection generally was obscured in practice, as governments reduced the precious metal content of coins or as the coins were clipped by counterfeiters.

Currency also formerly encapsulated the historically preferred mathematical relationship between different units, with units that could be readily divided not just in half but also by quarters or thirds without remainder were preferred. For example, before it was reformed in 1971, the British pound was divided into 20 shillings, each shilling worth 12 pence. Historically in the western world most people's math skills were limited to doubling numbers, or repeatedly dividing them in half. Hence the popularity of units like a pound (mass) divisible into 16 ounces, or an foot divided into 12 inches.

The metric system, devised in France in the 1790s during that country's great revolution, changed all that, using units that differed by pounds of 10, such as 1000 grams in a kilogram. It also created a connection between different kinds of units, such as between volume and weight - a gram was supposed to be the weight of one cubic centimeter of water at the temperature at which liquid water was most dense.

As far as we know, most French people didn't want decimals, what they wanted was uniformity: the country was awash in conflicting customary units, which ordinary people suspected were rejiggered, or picked and chose from, by the powerful (landlords, millers, etc.) to enrich themselves and to the detriment of the majority. The metric system was certainly uniform, but it's decimal basis was foreign to most ordinary people, but exactly what the scientists who devised it found most convenient in their own work. As originally formulated, the metric system isn't truly universal, as the unit of length, the meter, was one ten millionth of the meridian of longitude. passing through Paris; because the earth is not a perfectly symmetric geometrical figure, one ten millionth of one meridian is not the same distance as one ten millionth of another meridian.

Earlier, in 1784, Thomas Jefferson successfully advocated to the Continental Congress of the United States that the new nation adopt a decimal currency, with 100 cents to the dollar. Though it took a few years and a new constitution, when this policy was put into practice this change made the United States the first country with a decimal based currency. Given the link, then still in existence, between weights and currency values, it is somewhat surprising that the United States didn't adopt a decimal-based measurement system. Jefferson had his own ideas on what such a system should be, and wrote up a report on it when he was Secretary of State in the early 1790s, but he advocated waiting until Britain and France together devised a single system, something that seemed possible early in the French Revolution but never came to pass. Customary units seem to have survived because those in use in the United States were fairly uniform. Thus the situation was different from that of France, where there were at least dozens of different customary systems.

During the nineteenth century, other nations adopted the metric system, generally as they were created during unification campaigns (like Italy), when they became independent (Belgium from the Netherlands) and wanted to distinguish themselves from their former rulers, or as part of a modernization campaign. These events spread a system that hadn't been very popular in France under Napoleon or during the Bourbon restoration after he was forced out. The adoption of the metric system in the former colonies of the European powers after the Second World War followed a similar dynamic. Repeated campaigns to make the metric system the measurement system of the United States failed during the nineteenth century, but the system was made legal for transactions after the Civil War, and in fact the customary units became to be defined in terms of their metric counterparts during the post Civil War era. Time became more uniformly defined in the United States and across the world during the same period, with the adoption of fairly uniform time zones and making the Greenwich meridian the reference meridian for mapping.

The last well-publicized push for metrication in the United States came and failed during the 1970s. Behind the mask of computer software, which allows us to pretend we aren't using metric measures, the use of the metric system has generally increased. There are anomalies, some of them evident in a grocery store (mineral water sold in ounces, for example), and a more important behind the scenes one, the fact that the ubiquitous shipping container's volume is defined in terms of customary units. I think Marciano is right in suggesting that the advocates of the metric system in the United States were mistaken in thinking it was an all or nothing process.

I have not touched on all the subjects Marciano discusses in this well-written book, in particular on calendar reform, attempts to unify currencies in the nineteenth century, and changes in the monetary system during the twentieth century.The book contains a chapter by chapter section giving sources for each chapter, and also has a bibliography and index.

War of the Whales us about the harm caused to whales by the intense active sonar used by modern navies to find submerged submarines and the effort to

War of the Whales us about the harm caused to whales by the intense active sonar used by modern navies to find submerged submarines and the effort to rein in active sonar use by the US Navy. Active sonar involves producing a sound underwater and listening for the returning echo; in that sense it is analogous to radar.

Most of the events occur between the spring of 2000, when 9 beaked whales beached on a single day in the Bahamas, and the fall of 2008 when the relevant court case was heard by the US Supreme Court. Major characters include Ken Balcomb and Diane Claridge, a couple who kept a census of whales in the Bahamas and Puget Sound, and Joel Reynolds, the attorney who organized the lawsuits against the navy by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). On March 15, 2000, Balcomb and Claridge received multiple reports of whales stranding themselves. Most stranded whales are apparently dead before they arrive on shore; these standings were unusual in that the whales were alive, and thus that the stranding was an attempt by the whales to escape from a threat. These whales, mainly squid-eating beaked whales, normally live and hunt in the deep Great Bahama Canyon, and normally do not venture into shallow waters were they may be prey for sharks. Normally 9 whales do not strand in the Bahamas in a year, much less a day. Balcomb and Claridge, with the help of long-term volunteer Dave Ellifrit and short-term Earthwatch volunteers, managed to get some whales off the beach and also succeeded in removing and freezing the heads of some dead whales for autopsy to determine the cause of death. Balcomb, who had attended graduate school without completing his PhD, contacted Bob Gisner, an employee of the Office of Naval Research whom he knew from graduate school. Gisner in turn arranged for Darlene Ketten, a specialist in whale hearing, to have the heads CT-scanned and dissected after Balcomb and Claridge got the heads to Boston.

Balcomb appears to have had a fair idea of what happened, because he had been a sonar specialist in the navy in the 1970s and because he saw a US destroyer in the area on a flight to examine one of the stranded whales. In the late 1990s there was a mass standing of whales in Greece following a NATO naval exercise; it had been suspected that sonar use had caused this stranding, but the autopsy evidence was spotty. Ketten found blood hemorrhaged in both ears of the whales during the CT scan, suggesting damage from sound. As there had not been any earthquakes in the area or any oil prospecting (the industry uses very loud air guns to seismically study the seabed for oil), sonar was the only plausible culprit.

Beaked whales use their own sonar to hunt at great depths where the light is too dim to see. They also communicate with other members of their species by sound. Ironically, the US Navy has trained dolphins and other small whales to use their sonar to find mines and find enemy divers attempting to place explosive charges on the hulls of ships. Sounds produced by humans in the oceans can disrupt reproduction and migration even when the decibel level is too low to kill. Besides sonar and oil prospecting, the ever-increasing number of ever larger cargo ships puts a lot of sound in the oceans.

In May of 2000 Balcomb went public with his opinion that sonar had caused the deaths, using his videotaping of some of the autopsies (I think the autopsies Ketten made during a brief visit to the Bahamas) and his copy of the CT scans (which Ketten didn't think he had the right to show without her permission), and appearing on an episode of the news program 60 Minutes. These events made Balcomb a pariah among many of his fellow whale researchers, among the personnel of the National Marine Fisheries Service who were supposed to be regulating the navy, and probably was the event that ended his marriage to Claridge, who did not appreciate that he didn't consult her, particularly as his action would probably harm her efforts to gain research funding in her just-beginning scientific career; the Office of Naval Research is the primary patron of whale research and oceanography in general in the United States.

Balcomb's public comments are also almost certainly what caused the navy and the fisheries service to investigate the incident, releasing a "preliminary" report just late on a Friday afternoon on December 21, 2001, that for the first time admitted that sonar was the cause of these deaths in particular and were a risk to whales in general. A final report was never published.

This report allowed Reynolds, the NRDC lawyer, an opening to sue the navy. Reynolds had in the 1990s successfully engaged in litigation with the navy regarding where the navy planned to test the resistance of new ships to underwater explosions; the navy's original plan had these tests occurring in a marine preserve. Without going into the details, Reynolds consistently won in the lower federal courts but suffered a partial loss in the Supreme Court in 2008. The uniformed leadership of the navy had insisted that the case be appealed to the Supreme Court, as they did not want any limitations on sonar training and were worried about their own lawyers propensity to settle. However the decision written by Chief Justice Roberts was narrowly tailored to get a majority and left 4 of the 6 mitigation measures intact. Looking back over a couple of decades of litigation, the navy has been moved to training and test regimes that are less harmful to marine life.

Although Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann gets most of the press regarding the mid-nineteenth century remodeling of Paris, he was basically implementingAlthough Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann gets most of the press regarding the mid-nineteenth century remodeling of Paris, he was basically implementing the wishes of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, also known as Emperor Napoleon III. A number of problems with the city of Paris had been apparent for several decades. Streets running continuously through the central city to its outskirts, on either a north-south or east-west axis were conspicuous by their absence, additional supplies of drinkable water were needed, sewers to remove waste were required, and the central marketplace, Las Halles, needed to be rebuilt. These problems had been apparent since at least Napoleon I, and indeed Napoleon I and the King Louis-Philippe, the monarch prior to revolution of 1848 that allowed Napoleon III to take power, had carried out partial efforts to fix these problems. The efforts of Louis-Philippe's prefect of the Seine, Count Claude-Philibert Barthelot de Rambuteau, were especially notable and early in his rule Napoleon III simply continued these projects initiated by Rambuteau. What Napoleon III added was the determination and funding to push through a major overhaul, despite the resistance of the city council and the unhappiness of owners whose properties were condemned and the displacement of many working-class Parisians from the central city.

Nor was Haussmann the first prefect of the Seine under Napoleon's rule (the city did not get an elected mayor until the 1970s.) Jean-Jacques Berger was Louis-Napoleon's first prefect of the Seine, but he lacked the ruthlessness to push things through as fast as Louis-Napoleon wished. A lack of ruthlessness was not a condition Baron Haussmann suffered from. Haussmann's principal problem was in raising the money, as the city council didn't want to take on much debt or raise taxes very much. But with some give from the city government, a subsidy from the central government, and some dodgy ways of raising off-balance-sheet debt, Haussmann managed to finance the rebuilding. It cost much more than he advertised, though eventually he was forced to admit something resembling the true costs in the late 1860s. A good deal of insider trading of real estate, based on knowledge of where new roads were going in, took place. After the fall of Napoleon III as a result of losing the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, subsequent governments of the Third Republic basically continued Haussmann's program, even if a number of the politicians associated with the Republic had complained about Haussmann when he was in charge.

I think the people who suffered most from the rebuilding of the city were those working-class renters who were displaced to the suburbs of Paris, probably with an increase in rent. Owners of condemned real estate were compensated to varying degrees of lavishness. The rebuilding did result in such notable improvements as more drinkable water, roads connecting the various railroad stations (each station gave access to different parts of France and Europe,) an accessible central city, a new marketplace that served the city until the 1960s, and sewers. Public health improved. It is perfectly true that one reason for the wide roads into the central city was to make it easier for the army to crush urban rebellions; France may not have been a socially unstable country, but its capital certainly was a focal point of political unrest. However, the rebuilding of Paris had many other objectives, mostly more laudable, than simply keeping the proletarians from getting uppity.

As an autocratic government, the Second Empire was able to require a consistency of construction that resulted in a pleasing over-all urban landscape, rather than having buildings of widely varying styles jumbled on top of each other. Building was permitted to heights, about six stories, that is the maximum practical height when people are going to have to use stairs on a regular basis to get to the upper floors. I suspect that such uniformity would be impossible to require in the modern American context. The general political context of the rebuilding is so different from that of the contemporary United States that I doubt anything similar could be attempted in a modern American city; too many people have rights here. Thus the lessons we could learn from the rebuilding are limited.

The book is most engagingly written, and I greatly enjoyed it. I first posted this review at Amazon.com...more

Before starting this book, I had considerable doubts that a book about the writers Ambrose Bierce, Frank Norris, and the Central Pacific Railroad coulBefore starting this book, I had considerable doubts that a book about the writers Ambrose Bierce, Frank Norris, and the Central Pacific Railroad could hold my interest. Having in the past read a bit about the doings of nineteenth century trans-continental railroads, it wasn’t clear to me that I’d learn anything new about their dreary misdeeds and financial problems. Furthermore, trying to discuss a railroad and two authors in the same book could easily result in a narrative lacking focus. If the book had not been sitting on my public library’s shelves I would not have purchased it. I was most pleasantly surprised about the book, which weaved together the three different subjects successfully and is written wittily.

The event that ties Bierce, Norris and the Central Pacific together is the attempt by the railroad in 1896 to get its repayment of government loans from the 1860s, now due in full, delayed for several decades. This attempt appeared likely to succeed. Bierce, then working for the San Francisco Examiner as a columnist, was sent to Washington D. C. to cover the legislative struggle. The Examiner’s owner, William Randolph Hearst, had his own political ambitions, and as the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads (both under the same ownership) were most unpopular in California, negative coverage of this attempt would likely boost circulation. Backed by a small group of other reporters, Bierce covered the maneuverings with sufficient factual detail and wit to derail this bid, in large part due to his ability to get eastern newspapers, and thus the Congressional members from eastern states, interested in this apparently tedious request. The ultimate result was a compromise in which the railroad had ten years to pay up, expressed in a bill which did not permit the owners to hide money behind other corporate forms, such as the Southern Pacific or the holding company that owned both the Central and Southern Pacific. Bierce’s report was in turn an important source for Norris’s novel about the Southern Pacific, The Octopus.

The book is structured into five informal layers, each consisting of several chapters. First we learn of the idea for the Central Pacific railroad, in which Theodore Judah is the central figure. After Judah’s discouraging attempts to raise money from small investors, he succeeds in obtaining the support of Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford, and Charles Crocker. Though these folks have some money to invest, the vast majority of the funding will come from the federal government in both land grants and more importantly bonds that the railroad may sell (and keep the monies thus raised) while the federal government will pay the interest on these bonds until the railroad finally repays principal and interest in 30 years.

Like their rivals in the Union Pacific, the entity involved in building the first trans-continental railroad westwards, Huntington, Hopkins, Stanford, and Crocker, known as the Associates, hit upon the device of enriching themselves quickly by setting up a separate construction company that will build the railroad. Thus money comes in from the feds to the railroad, the railroad contracts with the construction company to build the railroad and the profits from construction go to the Associates. Poor Judah, who seems to have had some qualms about this, has the bad luck to die in 1863 from yellow. Crocker was in charge of the construction company, known as the Contract and Finance Company. Various shenanigans are engaged in to improve the return on investment, such as declaring that the Sierra Nevada starts seven miles east of Sacramento (the government pays substantially more for building in mountainous terrain), building the tracks much further east than originally envisioned and so on, all of these changes made possible in part by considerable bribery of state and Congressional figures. That said, the Central Pacific, unlike the Union Pacific, generally did a quality job of construction and there is no reason to doubt that the Associates truly intended to build a railroad as well as making off with as much government money as possible. Despite the government support, the Associates had frequent cash flow problems (government funds did not arrive in a timely fashion and costs of building in the mountainous areas often exceeded the government rate) as well as the difficulty in building through the Sierra Nevada. It is a tribute to their innate ability that men with no experience in construction or engineering (except for Judah, who died before much of the work was done) were able to accomplish such a feat. It’s a pity they didn’t have better financial morals. Many of the details of how they made their money will not be known, as they burned the books of the Contract and Finance Company. However, the surviving associates all had estates worth at least 20 million dollars at their deaths.

The Associates exercised considerable political power in California for at least a couple decades after the trans-continental railroad was completed; their power diminished during the last decade or two of the nineteenth century. They had also succeeded in rendering ineffective federal attempts, such as the Thurman Act of 1878, to make sure that they were setting aside funds to repay their debts. Owning both the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads, they had a near monopoly on rail transport within the state. They took full advantage of this power, charging high rates, and engaging in various shenanigans to boost their profits. One of these tricks was that even if your town lay along the railroad east of Sacramento, and could have been unloaded at a station near you, it would in fact be shipped to Sacramento, and then shipped backed to you. This procedure now only allowed the railroad to charge you more mileage, but the instate reshipment would be charged at a higher rate per ton-mile.

After getting the railroad set up, we learn of Ambrose Bierce’s early life, especially his formative Civil War service on the Union side. Bierce was born in 1842 in Horse’s Cave, Ohio (what are horses doing in a cave?), the tenth of thirteenth children of a well-read, pious, and financially feckless father. Bierce’s brief formal education included a stint at a military academy in Kentucky, where he gained the map-making skills that played an important role in his military career. His family having moved to Indiana when he was four, at nineteen Bierce joined the Ninth Indiana Volunteers after the outbreak of the Civil War. He saw action at Shiloh, Chickamauga, and at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain in 1864, where he received a head wound. His military career was marked by promotions from private to lieutenant. After getting out of the army, Bierce becomes a short story author and columnist in San Francisco. He became a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, a paper given to William Randolph Hearst in 1896 as a present from his father.

Bierce was deployed to Washington by Hearst in 1896 to cover the railroads attempts to delay repayment. Huntington, by then the only surviving member of the original Associates, favored a plan in which the railroad would repay the government over an 85(!) year period at a rate of 2% interest. Bierce pointed out how bad these terms were, and also succeeded in discovering that many of the Californians that allegedly supported the railroad’s proposal had in fact made no such statements of support. Despite this, Huntington might have succeeded if he had not simultaneously attempted to get the federal government to build a deep-water port in Santa Monica where the Southern Pacific ran. This side issue was much easier to understand and gave those unacquainted with the railroad funding issue an understanding of the rapacity of the Associates. Congress appointed a commission that in 1899 ordered the railroad to pay its debts over 10 years, in twenty installments of about three million dollars each. A separate commission determined that San Pedro rather than Santa Monica should be the site of the southern Californian port.

The following paragraph gives an indication of Bierce’s style. The Mayor Sutro referred to was the anti-railroad mayor of San Francisco.

Mr. Huntington is not altogether bad. Though severe, he is merciful. He tempers invective with falsehood. He says ugly things of his enemy, but he has the tenderness to be careful that they are mostly lies. So Mayor Sutro may reasonable hope to survive Mr. Huntington, though Mr. Huntington’s rancor blown about in space as a pestilential vapor will outlive all things that be. It is his immortal part.

Following chapters on Bierce’s coverage of events in Washington D. C., the focus switches to Frank Norris’ early life, and then the writing of the Octopus. The extent to which the events in the Octopus are fictionalized is discussed.

Unlike Bierce, Frank Norris grew up in wealth and comfort; his father owned a wholesale jewelry business. Born in 1870 to B. F. Norris and Gertrude Doggert, a former actress Norris grew up first in Chicago and then in 1885 the family moved to San Francisco. His parents divorced in 1894, Norris remaining with his mother, who received title to substantial real- estate holdings in lieu of alimony. Norris was educated at the University of California, took a writing course at Harvard,, and studied painting at the California School of Design and the Academie Julian in Paris. He never received a degree from any of these institutions; still, my impression is not of a slacker but of a young man who knows what he wants to do and has sufficient money to pursue his goals as he likes. Influenced greatly by the French novelist Emile Zola, Norris embarked on a career as a journalist and novelist. Starting as freelancer in1895 in San Francisco, he later covered the Anglo-Boer war in South Africa and the Spanish-American war in Cuba. Prior to writing about the Southern Pacific, Norris had published two novels, Moran of the Lady Letty, an adventure novel and McTeague, a novel about a marriage that ends in murder.

Norris’s novel about the Southern Pacific railroad, The Octopus, was intended as the beginning of a trilogy about the unlikely subject of wheat. The first step was to get the wheat out of the ground and shipped to world markets, which is where the Southern Pacific comes in. The shenanigans of the rate structures and the railroads handling of its real estate holdings are described in the novel, as is a fictionalized account of a shootout at Mussel Slough resulting from the railroads attempt to evict squatters on land granted to the railroad by the federal government.

As the author points out, Bierce and Norris had contrasting gifts in the writing of fiction. Bierce was an excellent short story writer, but never succeeded in writing a novel. This failure is especially unfortunate given his intimate knowledge of the Civil War, and that his recollections and stories about the war suggest that he could have written a most realistic account of the fighting, including the important role of feral hogs in disposing of the unburied dead. Norris in contrast couldn’t get the hang of the short-story form.Bierce inclined to a more gothic, romantic style, while Norris aimed for a naturalistic style.

Much of the pleasure of the book comes from the author’s style. To give you a flavor, I will quote a few paragraphs relating to the Mussel Slough shootout. This confused event resulted from a conflict between the Southern Pacific and people who had taken up farming in the Central Valley on land granted to the railroad by the federal government to encourage construction of the railroad. Without good reason to do so, the settlers had convinced themselves that the railroad’s title to the land was poor, and that they would be able to buy the land at $2.50 per acre; they were in fact squatting. A portion of the settlers had organized a vigilante organization, the Settler’s League, to violently defend their possessions, and had begun committing arson and acts of intimidation against those settlers who disagreed with them. After a federal court case in its favor, unfortunately presided over by a judge with close connections to Leland Stanford, the railroad began eviction procedures and after messy and confusing offers to sell the land to settlers at $4-5 per acre. A federal marshal and a railroad employee, accompanied by two richer settlers who hoped get the land of those evicted, began the process of eviction. On their second stop they ran into a mass meeting of the unhappy settlers. The result on May 11, 1880, was a shootout in which 7 people died, five settlers and the two farmers who hoped to profit from their distress. Here is how Drabelle describes the public perception, as opposed to the likely reality, of the event.

The legend of the Mussel Slough massacre prevailed because it told people what they thought they already knew, because it corroborated stereotypes, because it fed the desire for easily recognizable good and bad guys. The League itself put its finger on the widespread readiness to believe the worst of the Southern Pacific in a pamphlet published shortly after the shootings:

All good people sympathize with the right. Generousimpulses and a desire that justice shall prevail are with them universal. Among them jealousy of railroadcorporations does not exist simply because they are corporations, but because it is known to all men thatthey too often take advantage of their great power toannoy and oppress individuals.

It was ’known' to all men – or at least strongly suspected – that, in a battle between the railroad and ordinary citizens, the railroad would invariably take the low road. To put it in journalistic terms, ‘TRAGEDY IN CENTRAL VALLEY: Confusing Battle ensues after Railroad Loses Patience in Lengthy Feud with Risk-Taking Squatters’ would have made an accurate but tepid headline. ‘RAILROAD GUNS DOWN FIVE IN CENTRAL VALLEY: Agents of Brutal Monopolist Massacre Farmers Whose Only Fault is Trying to Hang on to What They Achieved by the Sweat of Their Brows’ – now that would have sold papers!

Incidentally, Norris’s account of Mussel Slough follows the myth more than the reality. Norris did not live to complete trilogy, dying in 1903 of appendicitis.

Charles Leduff, a white journalist, gave up a job at the New York Times to return to the Detroit area where he grew up. After working for two years foCharles Leduff, a white journalist, gave up a job at the New York Times to return to the Detroit area where he grew up. After working for two years for the Detroit Free Press, Leduff became a television reporter for the local Fox affiliate. Mr. Leduff writes engagingly about the appalling state of Detroit.

The history of the region cannot be understood without reference to the great racial divisions in the area. After the beginning of the twentieth century .Essentially, after the beginning of the twentieth century, when the automobile industry began to boom, lots of people moved to the Detroit area including many African-Americans from the south. African-Americans were discriminated against in terms of employment and housing, with binding covenants used to enforce the residential segregation. After the 1967 race riots, whites started leaving the city in great numbers, so that today the city is by a large majority African-American.

To his surprise, Leduff discovers that he encapsulates much of this history in his own family background. Leduff’s grandfather was a Creole from Louisiana who was light-skinned enough to pass for white. So was Leduff’s great-grandfather, who moved the family to Detroit and moved into a neighborhood otherwise inhabited by swarthy white folks from southern Europe. By not volunteering to be discriminated against, the men were able to live in better neighborhoods and get better jobs than otherwise would have been the case. Leduff’s grandfather never mentioned to wives his own racial background, and Leduff found out the story only by searching through old census records and noticing the change from “Mulatto” or “Negro” to “white” after the family reached Detroit.

The result of this racial tension is a corrupt Detroit city government. Playing the race card in this now mostly African-American city has allowed a number of corrupt officials (who often appear to be related to each other) to stay in office for many years and loot the city. Prominent among those Leduff describes are Kwame Kilpatrick, the former mayor of Detroit, and former City Council member Monica Conyers. The white suburbs also play the race card, but apparently the consequences for them don’t include the dysfunction that the city suffers from.

This corruption may not have mattered had the American automobile industry continued to prosper, but it did not. Consequently corrupt politicians are siphoning money away from a city that is now poor to being with. The city is down to about 700,000 residents. About 40% of the city is vacant land. No major grocery chains have stores within the city limits.

The fire department uses equipment that is decrepit to the point of being dangerous to the staff (despite having sold off the brass poles of the firehouse to sell them for scrap). Arson is a major problem in the city. Some of the arson is recreation, other fires, such as the one that kills fire fighter Walt Harris, was done for the insurance money. Part of the fire department’s problem appears to be a good deal of looting of the budget hidden in the maintenance and construction contracts.

Crime rates are very high, and response times for fire, police, and ambulances are very slow – about a half hour for the latter two services. It can be a challenge to get the police to come at all, as Leduff makes clear in his story about being informed of the corpse of a homeless man found frozen in the ice that had collected at the base of an elevator shaft in an abandoned building. It took multiple calls to the police to get them to take a look.

Homicide detectives have huge caseloads. Due to the dysfunction of Wayne county, the local jail cannot house half the persons it has space for; consequently persons arrested for violent acts or weapons charges often get probation, even after it becomes clear that they cannot be counted on to report to the supervisory officer. Gangs murder witnesses to other crimes. The local morgue has bodies in a refrigerated semi-truck trailer, in part because many of the relatives are too poor to bury the bodies of the deceased.

Leduff’s family has suffered in ways similar to many of the residents of Detroit. His sister Nicole suffered from her drug and alcohol abuse, sometimes working as a prostitute. Nicole died at age 35 after she leapt from a speeding van, probably to get away from a client who appeared to be driving straight into a building. His niece, Nicole’s daughter, died of a heroin overdose after he had moved back to the Detroit area.

One thing I disliked was Leduff referring to the minimum security women’s prison in West Virginia that Monica Conyers was sent to for 3 years as “Camp Cupcake.” Even minimum security prison sucks. For people not as well connected as Ms. Conyers any felony conviction usually has life-long negative consequences. I agree with Leduff that the record of Ms. Conyers corruption as a “public servant” certainly deserved prison time, particularly in the context of a local political culture that has gotten away with corruption for a long time and needs to be sent a message. I also don’t agree with his approval of the 42 year sentence for the Mario Willis for the death of Walt Harris. I could see 10 year as being justified, and certainly Willis did himself no favors in his statements at sentencing, but as Willis was trying to collect insurance money rather than intending to kill people 42 years seems too long to me. On the other hand, I thought he had a point when he said how ridiculous he thought the complaints of the local art community (mostly white) that the media didn’t write about the positive things happening in the city, as if an art exhibition outweighs being the murder capital of the United States.

But the above points are quibbles. I greatly enjoyed his writing style....more

Got to about page 399 of this history of (mainly) the French war in Indochina after the Second World War. By this point in the narrative many French pGot to about page 399 of this history of (mainly) the French war in Indochina after the Second World War. By this point in the narrative many French politicians wanted out but they were not sure how to do this given the enthusiasm of the new Eisenhower administration in the United States for continuing the war. The author emphasizes that the steps that American adminstrations saw as necessary for a successful (i. e. non-communist) outcome in Vietnam required steps, such as a path for Vietnamese independence, which would remove most incentives for France to continue fighting, as France would no longer have a colony (formal or otherwise) in Indochina.

The author devotes much attention to events before the outbreak of fighting being the Viet Minh and French forces. This book is mainly a diplomatic and political history, though descriptions of the more important battles also occur. He describes Ho Chi Minh's life prior to the war, and the odd events during the Second World War in Indochina, events that made it possible for the Viet Minh to gain a foothold at the end of that war.

During most of the Second World War, French Indochina was used by the Japanese as a base, but was still governed. by the French colonial administration. This adminstration was for most of the way loyal to the Vichy government in France, which collaborated with Nazi Germany. Towards the end of the war a Gaullist coup was easily swatted down by the Japanese forces. The easy with which the Japanese crushed the French seems to have permanently lowered the prestige of the French in the eyes of the Vietnamese population. At the end of the war northern Vietnam was occupied by non-communist Chinese troops, who didn't much like the French and let Ho Chi Minh start setting up a government and army. After some agreements between the French and Ho Chi Minh broke down, fighting between the French and the Viet Minh began; when you want to mark the beginning of the war is a matter of taste, as dates in 1945 or 1946 can both be defended. Suffice it to say that a territory that in 1939 was ruled without much trouble by a few thousand French forces was by 1947 ruled with considerable difficulty by a much larger French force.

The adjective "French" needs some interpretation. The French government was never willing to send French conscripts to fight in Indochina. So the French forces in Vietnam consisted of those soldiers who had volunteered to join the French army, some French legion forces (at the beginning of the fighting, many of these were Germans who signed up so as to get out of French prisons), units from French colonies in sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa, and Vietnamese units whose officers were French.

Ho Chi Minh (one of a number of alias) was a Vietnamese nationalist long before he became a communist. He was fluent in a number of languages (English, French, and Chinese) as well as Vietnamese. He had spent time in the United States, the Soviet Union, China, Britain and France and when he returned to Vietnam in the 1940s he hadn't set foot in the country for about 2 decades. It was in France in the 1920s that he became a communist and shortly thereafter a Comintern agent.

Militarily, the Viet Minh were divided into militia, provincial level, and what I could call "main-line" units. The militia units were part-timers who engaged in guerrilla warfare as well as providing porters for the "main-line" units, who were very much a Western style army. After the Chinese communist victory in 1949, the Viet Minh got a lot of material support and advice from the Chinese. The French got even more material support from the Americans, as well as advice they didn't much like. The French had an airforce (of American planes) the Viet Minh did not.

I find the French military strategy puzzling. They seemed to oscillate between defending perimeters around large cities like Hanoi and Saigon and setting up more distant outposts that were hard to supply. Sometimes there seemed to be a point to some of the better positioned outposts, in that these were easier to supply and as sometimes the Viet Minh general Giap would attack them and be defeated with heavy losses. The French don't seem to rarely have had much success in coping with guerrilla fighting of the militia units. The French attempts at encouraging the formation of a non-communist, Vietnamese government were not even half-hearted, because the French did not wish to give up control. I found it surprising that given the apparent French objective of maintaining their colony, they did not early on in the fighting attempt an offensive to capture and destroy the central Viet Minh government, which would seem to me to be the only policy that might give the French what they wanted.

This final volume of the 3 volume biography of Winston Churchill begun by the late William Manchester covers Churchill's last 25 years, beginning withThis final volume of the 3 volume biography of Winston Churchill begun by the late William Manchester covers Churchill's last 25 years, beginning with his most important years, his time as Prime Minister of Britain during most of the Second World War. Though lacking the gloriously purple prose that some times adorned the first volume, it is a good read. Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940 due to the debacle of British intervention in Norway after the German invasion of that country, and remained Prime Minster until after the defeat of Germany in 1945, being replaced as Prime Minister by Clement Atlee during the Potsdam conference after the Labor party's electoral victory.

After it became clear that France would be defeated following the May 1940 invasion, Churchill's immediate goal was to prevent British defeat and his longer-term goal was to get the United States fighting on Britain's side. Even absent American belligerency, Britain required American financial support if it was to continue fighting. Churchill's resolve to continue fighting was not the obvious decision, and he had some difficulty in persuading several of the leading members of the Conservative Party not to seek peace terms.

Churchill courted the American President Franklin Roosevelt in his attempts to gain financial support and get the United States involved in the war, He eventually got the former, through Lend Lease, but had to wait for Germany to declare war on the United States after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to get the latter. Lend lease support required concessions in other areas such as trade policy on Britain's part. Britain ended the war broke, which did not aid help in preserving the British empire. The Americans also disapproved the British empire and tried to use their leverage to end British colonialism. One of the oddities to me was the American view that Britain remained a great power, when the economic information they collected as part of lend lease would have shown the reverse. Churchill had not intended for the war to result in the end of the empire, but that was one consequence of the war.

In the overall strategy of the war, Britain began with the most influence, because it actually had troops. As American military power grew, British influence declined. This decline in influence was most obvious over the arguments regarding the invasion of France. I disagree with the authors in that I believe Churchill was somewhat less enthusiasm for this operation than they believe.

The years after the war brought Churchill financial security. He had always lived like a rich man; now he had the assets to back it up. He held onto leadership of the Conservative Party in order to finally become Prime Minister due to an electoral victory, rather than a Parliamentary deal. He achieved this in the early 1950s. He then held on for some years longer than he had said he would as Prime Minister, to the fury of his designated successor Anthony Eden, partly due to his wish to arrange a summit meeting with the Soviets to cool down the Cold War. He failed in this aim and resigned in 1955. His last years were more pleasant than is usually depicted, at least until his daughter Diana committed suicide in the early 1960s. He died in 1965, a bit over 90 years old....more

The Great Railroad Revolution is a history of trains in the United States from their beginnings to the present day. The author, Christian Wolmar, als

The Great Railroad Revolution is a history of trains in the United States from their beginnings to the present day. The author, Christian Wolmar, also provides some background information about railroads in Britain early in the book, because steam trains originated in that country. The use of rails to reduce friction for moving heavy loads, such as ore from mines, has a long history. Horses were often use as the motive power before steam, and initially on railroads it was not uncommon for the horses to be used initially. The development of the railroad was not simply a technical one, but also required a shift in business thinking, away from the idea of moving a single commodity (such as coal) from a single source (such as the mine you owned along with the rail tracks), to a model in which you would take anyone (or their freight) who could pay. However, trains were different canals, their main competitor when they started out, in that the operator of the railroad provided the locomotive (not always the cars) and determined the schedule; with canals generally anyone could use their own boat and their was no fixed schedule.

The earliest functioning railroad in the United States seems to have been the Charleston & Hamburg in South Carolina, completed in 1833, though the Baltimore and Ohio usually gets the credit as its charter was issued first. The reason behind the formation of the Baltimore and Ohio is revealing and typical of the early railroads: the desire not to be left behind, in this case by New York City's link to the states beyond the Appalachians through the Erie Canal. As a canal seemed impractical for Baltimore, the local merchants opted to try a railroad instead, though their railroad did not actually reach the Ohio river until 1852.

Most early railroads were intended for only local uses. The railroads, like other transportation developments, often benefited from local and state (federal support for transporation projects was limited before the Civil War due to the constitutional views of the Democratic Party), though perhaps less directly than the direct subsidies given to canal building. The railroads used a large number of inconsistent gauges (distance between the rails) which made transfering passangers or freight difficult. In the years before the Civil War, passangers rather than freight seems to have been the major source of revenue.

In the 1850s some trunk lines, such as the Pennsylvania railroad, developed, creating unified systems running from the east coast to Chicago, which became (for no particular good reason) the end point for railroads from the east. For over a century, passengers wanting to travel from west of Chicago to the east coast, or vice versa, would have to change trains in Chicago. Chicago also became the center of the meat processing industry, with cattle (or later their refrigerated corpses) traveling to Chicago for packing.

Before the Civil War, northern railroads were largely built by the inhabitants of the locality in which the railroads were constructed. Southern railroads were generally built by slaves rented from their owners. After the Civil War, southern railroads were for some decades built by prison labor, usually African-American, leased to the companies by the locality or state government. Conditions for these men were noticeably worse than they had been in the slave era (!) and the death rate was very high. In the north, the transcontinental railroads had to import the labor to build the lines from other parts of the United States or from overseas. The Union Pacific, building west from Omaha, benefited from the large number of men recently released from military service in the Civil War. The Central Pacific, working east from California, ended up bringing in large number of Chinese laborers, who were excellent workmen, and more to the point could be paid substantially less than white men. Chinese labor was common on all of the western railroads for the next several decades.

The railroads played the major role in supporting the Northern and Southern armies in the field during the Civil War. Although the Confederate forces initially had a better grasp of the use (and sabatoge) of railroads, the Union quickly became more skillful than the Confederates in the use of railroads, in large part because the Federal government had more success than the Confederate government in taking control of the railroads. The North also started with the great benefit of having most the railroads and supporting industries.

One noticeable change after the Civil War was that freight rather than passangers generated most of the revenue, a circumstance that has remained the same up to the present - though of course now there are few passangers and the passanger railroad, Amtrak, is government owned. The railroad gauge was gradually standardized, making it easier to move people and passangers without unloading and reloading trains. The industry also consolidated into fewer businesses. The railroads suffered from a poor public image in the decades after the Civil War, for good and bad reasons. In the decade after the Civil War, there were a number of battles for control over various railroads, such as the New York Central, which reasonably damaged the industry's image. The considerable financial deceit and intentional cost over runs in building the first transcontinental railroads, the Union Pacific and Central Pacific, also caught the public's attention. Labor relations were poor, and the public tended to be more sympathetic to the men (I think they were all men at this time) rather than the management. Less reasonably, but getting the most ink, was the alleged unfairness of the railroads dealings with western farmers, who tended to be dependent on a single railroad and who objected to volume discounts for large shippers. Most of the farmers financial problems seem to have been more due to the great expansion in crop production, which reduced prices.

the eventual result of this bad publicity was the establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887. Though initially toothless, this agency did, starting in 1906, have a great deal of power over the rates the railroads could charge and routes they could use - indeed they had to get the Commission's approval to close a route. The Commission mandated price floors. The timing was poor, because the internal combustion engine and the automobile were just showing promise. Furthermore, the Federal Government would start funding road construction in the Wilson administration. So trucking got a subsidy (not that railroads had not received subsidies)and also could undercut the floor price railroad were required to charge, and later airlines would also be subsidized. Though the depression and Second World War would delay matters, railroads were in for a hard time.

After several decades of decline after the Second World War, freight railroads are now thriving. The main cause seems to have been killing off the Interstate Commerce Comission in 1980. Now, in an arena where trucking offered a viable competitor, so the problem of monopoly no longer existed, freight railroads could charge market prices, and proved to be able to thrive. Such passanger railroads as exist are run by the government-owned Amtrak. Americans appear allergic to subsidising railroads anymore, while still handing out indirect (but very big) subsidies to trucks and automobiles, airlines, and shipping on internal waterways.

I enjoyed this book about the beginnings of industrialization in the United States. The author, Charles R. Morris, concentrates on the period before

I enjoyed this book about the beginnings of industrialization in the United States. The author, Charles R. Morris, concentrates on the period before the Civil War. He gives examples from several different industries, including clock-making, textiles, iron and steel, making sewing machines, and firearms. He compares the industrialization process in the United States with that in Great Britain, and in the final chapter briefly discusses the growth of China in relation to American prospects, a development which has similarities to the economic growth of the United States when Great Britain was the leading industrial nation. I think his writing style has improved since he wrote The Tycoons, an earlier book with overlapping subject matter, though in that book Morris focused on the second half of the nineteenth century. Another nice feature of the book are the many good drawings that show how various mechanisms worked.

Morris sees mass production as the main characteristic of American industrial growth during this period. Mass production need not require either mechanization or interchangeable parts, two characteristics that other authors have seen as the essence of American industrial practice.For example, Massachuessetts developed a mass production shoe industry well before it machine tools and factories became a common aspect of the industry; in essence the industry started as a massive example of the "putting out" system, in which merchants provided raw materials to families contracted to produce shoes. However, mechanization was a common if not universal feature of many American industries. Furthermore, mechanization and interchangeable parts are not two sides of the same coin. For example, American small arms, particularly those for military use, eventually came to have many interchangeable parts, and had a good many machine tools used in their production, but making the parts interchangeable for a long time required a good deal of fiddly hand work. Clocks were made using specialized tools, but the genius of Eli Terry's design for mass-produced clocks was that his design (which was widely copied) allowed a final adjustment to achieve reasonable accuracy, so that the need for mechanical perfection was side-stepped.

In contast to the United States, Great Britain did not in most industries develop mass production. Its hard to explain why Great Britain did not take this step, as their textile industry was the prime example of mass production in this period. British management and workers seemed to be more set in their ways, but there were periodic alarms, such as during the 1851 Exhibition in London, about what the Americans were up to. The British also sometimes seemed to become focused on matters, such as machine tools of extreme precision, of little practical importance.

The relationship between the United States and China does have some similarities between that of the United States and Britain two centuries ago, but with the roles reversed. One similarity is that the industrializing nation is quite fond of making off with the ideas and technology of the more developed one, though China has the advantage of illictly using electronic communication systems that did not exist in the 1800s. One great distance between the United States in the 1800s and contemporary China is that the United States was expanding into lightly populated territory, while contemporary China is of course very populous. One consequent difficulty that China faces, exacerbated by its pattern of development, is a shortage of water, especially clean water, and its unfortunate geographical distribution (not enough in northern China). The United States during its industrialization did not face a similar problem....more

As I had enjoyed Mr. McCraw's biography of the economist Joseph Schumpeter, I decided to give this book a try. I'm glad that I did. McCraw noticed th

As I had enjoyed Mr. McCraw's biography of the economist Joseph Schumpeter, I decided to give this book a try. I'm glad that I did. McCraw noticed that most of the officials directly involved in public finance under the Articles of Confederation and the early administrations after the ratification of the Constitution were immigrants. The three figures that get the most attention are Robert Morris, Alexander Hamilton, and Albert Gallatin. All three immigrated after they had become old enough for their experiences prior to reaching America to leave a mark on their thinking about public finance. Morris and Hamilton had both been apprenticed in buisnesses before immigrating as teenagers, while Gallatin had an excellent secondary education in Geneva. McCraw argues that their backgrounds brought an needed and hard to find, in America, familiarity with finance and especially banking.

Morris had the bad luck to serve during the Revolution and then in peace time under the Articles of Confederation. As the Articles required unanimity among the former colonies to levy national taxes, such taxes were not forthcoming. Consequently, paying the large debts racked up during the revolution was impossible. Morris did succeed in establishing the first bank in the country, the Bank of North America in Philadelphia. Later in life Morris got into debts he could not repay while engaged in real estate speculation (a true American!) and spend some years in debtor's prison. He died in the early 1800s a few years after his release.

Hamilton had much more success as policy maker, as he served as the first treasurery secretary of the United States. As the federal government had the power to tax, revenue was available to repay debts from the Revolution. Most revenue was raised through duties on imports; internal taxes, such as one on whiskey, were much more controversial. With President Washington's support, Hamilton was able to push through a measure in which both the debts of the revolutionary-era Contintental Congress and the states were assumed by the federal government and paid off at face value. To do this, in essence the federal government would refinance these debts by issuing new bonds. This measure was contraversial, especially among southern politicians, mainly because the debts had mostly been resold by the original holders (often soldiers or someone else who had a stake in the successful outcome of the Revolution) to third parties, and partly for the much better reason that generally the southern states had paid off their debts and they did not relish paying taxes to fund the debts of laggard northerners. Hamilton correctly argued that less than full repayment to all holders of the debt would ruin America's credit rating; he also wanted to create a group who would have a financial interest in a federal government that would continue to pay the interest and principal on the bonds they bought. In order to get his way and gain the support of his cabinet colleague, Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton supported the establishment of the permanent capital in the south, at Washington D. C.

Hamilton also succeeded in getting the Bank of the United States, a sort of forerunner to the Federal Reserve, established. The Bank of the United States was a hybrid public-private institution that could influence the money supply based on its willingness, or lack there of, to accept the bank notes (in essence privately printed paper currency) issued by other banks. It also helped as a depository of federal funds, a source of loans in time of crisis, and provided the logistics for moving federal funds around the nation. This measure was also controversial among southern law makers, and the charter was set to expire in 1811, with unfortunate consequences as we will see.

Unfortunately, Hamilton had limited personal political skills. He got on the wrong side of John Adams (an easy thing to do for the kindest person, I admit), the second President, through his interference in policy making. His reaction to the public disclosure of an affair he had had while Treasury Secretary made the scandal worse and ended his political career. He died in the early 1800s after being fatally wounded in a duel with Aaron Burr.

Hamilton’s policies allowed for the paying down of the inherited debts. His successor under Jefferson and Madison, Albert Gallatin, benefited from these policies. Gallatin made paying down the debt his major priority. During his time as a congressman in the 1790s he had taken issue with Hamilton’s assumption of the state and Continental Congress debts, but he did not alter the policy when in office. Gallatin had always supported the Bank of the United States, and had argued for a renewal of its charter in 1811. President Madison did not give renewal adequate political support. As a consequence, when war against Great Britain was declared in 1812, there was no mechanism in place to raise loans to support the war effort. The foolishness of not having a central bank was, briefly, recognized, for in 1816 a new Bank of the United States was chartered, only for its charter not to be renewed in the 1830s.

Gallatin also supported the acquisition of the Louisiana territory when Jefferson had doubts about his authority to buy it; ironically Gallatin used arguments about the scope of federal powers very similar to those of his opponent from the 1790s, Alexander Hamilton. Gallatin’s greatest blunder was to support Jefferson’s wish to run down the navy in the early 1800s. This policy was poorly timed, as France and Britain were engaged in the long-running Napoleonic wars. One consequence of these wars was that either France or Britain would take naval action against the merchant ships of neutrals who were deemed to be too friendly to the other side. Jefferson suffered from the delusion that the distance of the United States from Europe, combined with a fleet of small and cheap gunboats, would suffice to deter Britain (he rather liked France). This policy did nothing to prevent British naval ships from stopping American merchant ships, often to press (informally and brutally conscript) sailors deemed to be British subjects (which they often were). Gallatin is to be credited for his opposition to Jefferson’s later policies of outlawing trade with Britain, which hurt the United States a lot more than Britain.

The book peters out after Gallatin’s involvement in the peace negotiations to end the war of 1812. Gallatin lived until 1849, and until his last year or so was active. The book is well referenced.

The reason Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was painting the Last Supper was that Lodovico Sforza (1452-1508) wanted to spruce up the Dominican convent

The reason Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was painting the Last Supper was that Lodovico Sforza (1452-1508) wanted to spruce up the Dominican convent of Santa Maria delle Graziein order to make it a fitting resting place for his family. Sforza could have such ambitions because he was determined to gain firm control over the city-state of Milan. Leonardo’s painting proved longer-lasting than Sforza’s political success, but required a lot of help to do so.Francesco Sforza, father of Lodovicio, had earlier usurped de facto power in Milan from the Visconti family (into which the Sforza’s had intermarried) though I’m not clear on whether or not he retained a Visconti as a figurehead. Sforza certainly did not, having deposed the last Visconti, Giangaleazzo. This coup had the unfortunate effect of irritating the in-laws of Visconti, specifically Giangaleazzo’s wife Isabella and her father, King Alfonso II of Naples, who took measures to remove Sforza. As a counter-measure Sforza in 1494 invited the French king Charles VIII to invade the Italian peninsula, a measure which caused immense trouble for Italians and for Sforza himself.

Leonardo had arrived in Milan hoping to re-invent himself as a military engineer, though he was content with the initial major project assigned to him, to come up with an immense bronze equestrian statue of Sforza’s father. This project came to an end with Lodovicio needed the bronze to make cannons. He also did a fair bit of grunt work, basically scenery design and interior decorating for the Sforza family. Anyone hiring Leonardo after his career in Tuscany was taking a risk, because while he seems to have impressed everyone on first sight with his tremendous abilities (the only way I can explain his continued commissions), he left behind him a trail of uncompleted works, or works that would only be completed decades later and not make into the possession of the intended buyers. The long-established practice of Italian patrons in drawing up quite specific contracts on what they expected the employed artist (generally viewed as a craftsman) and when it was to be done by had little success in driving Leonardo to complete his work. Leonardo, true to the sad experiences of his previous clients, doesn’t seem to have been making much progress with the statue even before his raw material was re-allocated.

Putting the Last Supper on the wall of a monastery’s refectory was a common practice in Leonardo’s time. The author, Ross King, describes the iconographic choices Leonardo made from the somewhat differing accounts given in the Gospels. Usually artists of Leonardo’s time used the true fresco technique in painting a plastered wall, a technique that involves using watercolors on not-yet-dry plaster. Fresco creates durable paintings, but also limits the color choices available and places a premium on speed, not one of Leonardo’s virtues. Sometimes true frescos were touched up with brighter colors applied to the dried plaster, but these colors fade and wear.

Leonardo decided to try using oil pigments on the wall, an unusual choice that gave him greater range of colors and allowed him time to modify the work as he went along. He did not work alone, having a small crew of assistants. Probably he did the more difficult bits, leaving the simpler parts to his assistants. Leonardo was centuries ahead of his time in his understanding of complementary colors, and had a great understanding of how using different background colors affected the illusion of depth in his work.The example given by the Last Supper quickly affected artistic practice in Europe. Leonardo had raised the bar for good painting. The Last Supper was also the only work of Leonardo’s that would be publicly displayed for centuries, until his other paintings made their way from private collections to museum walls.

Leonardo’s technique unfortunately was at odds with preserving the work for future generations. The innovative use of oil paint on a plaster surface was not durable, unlike true fresco. After only a few decades the painting was noticeably decayed. Restoration attempts before the second half of the twentieth century did much more harm than good. Fortunately, several artists made copies of the work in its first few decades, so it is possible to learn what Leonardo intended.

I’ve enjoyed Mr. King’s several other books on art history and this one was no exception.

Karen Elliott House, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, does not think that the status quo in Saudi Arabia can prevail for much longer for the fo

Karen Elliott House, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, does not think that the status quo in Saudi Arabia can prevail for much longer for the following reasons. Saudi Arabia has a demographic bulge of young people (60% are under twenty years), who are better informed than any previous generation thanks to the internet and satellite television, stagnant incomes for much of the population, conflicts over religion and the role of women, a ruling dynasty that is losing legitimcy, and a geriatric political leadership of senior princes. Ms. House does not believe under these circumstances the status quo can continue, as young men know that personal freedom is greater in other Arab countries, are informed about the corruption of the royal family, the Al Saud, and have problems with unemployment (probably close to 40%) and housing.

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy that has been ruled since 1953 by the sons of the founder of dynasty, Abdul Aziz. The sons have been inheriting the throne in order of seniority (generally) and range from old to very old. Eventually there will have to a jump to a younger generation; this is very tricky politically, because Abdul Aziz had 44 sons (page 125), many of whom also had many sons, so the royal family now has thousands of male members. Consequently, a jump to a younger generation invites conflict between different branches of the family. It is relevant to note here that the 3 ministries that control armed forces, Defense, Interior, and National Guard, are controlled by different branches of the family. The royal family has ruled in alliance with literal-mined Wahhabi religious scholars, who generally are opposed unrelated men and women mixing, female employment, women driving, public entertainment, toleration of other religions,representative art, free speech, and of course pornography and alcohol. The religious police can harass and arrest those thought to be violating these standards. The royal family generally has the upper hand over the scholars; for example the current king succeeded in establishing a research university in which men and women can mix. But these exceptions are never extended to the general society, and I had the impression that when the king got a concession in one area he threw the religious establishment a bone by letting them be even stricter towards the behavior of the general public. The royal family has also endeavored to keep the population divided, by trying to preserve tribal and regional distinctions.

Despite all that oil, the per-capita income of Saudi Arabia's roughly 26 million people is about $18,000 a year (I looked up the figures in Wolfram Alpha) and depending on how decide what constitutes poverty, 20% to 40% of the population is poor. Shanty towns and tents can be found on the outskirts of the major cities (I learned from Ms. House that 80% of the population lives in 3 major cities).

The labor market is screwy; on page 157 we learn that two thirds of the employed in Saudi Arabia are foreigners, with 90% of private sector employees being foreigners. Most of these foreigners are doing unskilled work which could be done by Saudis, if Saudi men were willing to do manual labor, or work in a service industry, or do blue collar work, or in Saudi women were allowed to work in more than a tiny number of jobs. Most Saudis lack the education for skilled work; Ms. House does not address the possibility that if Saudi families didn't get various public and private charitable support, then their menfolk would be more likely to get a job. Women are generally forbidden to work with unrelated men, which makes employment beyond being a teacher in a girl's school or a physician seeing women patients difficult to find. The waste of talent is even greater than this implies, because in recent years more women than men are graduating from university.

Housing is also a big problem. Few can afford to buy a house. There seem to be two reasons for this problem. First, most of the land is owned, or at least controlled, by various royal princes, and they generally aren't selling, so prices for land are high. Second, sharia law in Saudi Arabia forbids loaning money at interest, so you can't get a mortgage. The public funding to help men buy houses is oversubscribed and new applicants have decades to wait until their case comes up.

The quality of education in the kingdom is poor, at least for those who think schools should focus on things besides memoirizing the Koran and learning the Wahhabi (also referred to as Salafi) interpretation of shari law. Great emphasis is placed on memorization, which I have less problems with than the author does, provided you are memorizing the right stuff. Most university students major in some sort of study of Islam, which means they come out with no skills any private employer wants, a situtation any liberal arts student in the United States may be familiar with. The facilities for public schools are often poor, though the current king is spending substantially more on education so perhaps the physical problems can be fixed. The more basic problem is that the religious estabishment has control over school ciricula.

Women are slightly less oppressed now than in the past. Women can now in get a hotel room or rent an apartment without a male relative's consent. They can now get their own identification card, another measure which also reduces the control of male relatives (usually father or husband) over a woman. Government ministries are now supposed to have sections specifically to help women get permits, etc. though compliance is not universal.

The idea of the rule of law is one that Saudi Arabia appears to have even more problems with than other countries. Corruption is rampant, including among judges. Obtaining many government benefits, approval of job transfers within the civil service, access to government contracts, permits and like require either a bribe or getting the support of the member of the royal family.

Ms. House thinks the dynasty should try what she admits is the tricky business of gradual reform. I can't see how this can be done; so many of the problems relate to the religious establishment or the position of the royal family, and I can't see how the family can push either of these to the side, a necessary condition for reform of education, the land market, and reducing corruption, without losing what legitimcy it has.

Mr. Merry, a former journalist, takes the pastime of rating the Presidents of the United States with some seriousness. I think he does have add a nic

Mr. Merry, a former journalist, takes the pastime of rating the Presidents of the United States with some seriousness. I think he does have add a nice twist to the process, by comparing historian's rankings with the electoral success of the presidents or the success of their political parties in retaining the White House upon the end of their legally required or customarily expected two terms, if they made it that far. One tricky bit, nicely dealt with, is how to judge Presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt or Harry Truman who became president because of the death in office of their predecessor. Merry judges them on their ability to win a term in their own right and also whether or not their party retained the office for the subsequent term. The gold standard for electoral success is to get elected for two terms in a row and then have another member of your party succeed you; of course Franklin Delano Roosevelt did even better than this by getting elected to four terms and having a successor, Truman, who managed to win election in his own right.

Merry determines historian's rankings of the presidents by reference to 7 polls of historians. Two of these polls were by Arthur Schlesinger Sr, a historian, in 1948 (the first such poll) and 1962. The subsequent polls were carried by Porter in 1981, the Chicago Tribune newspaper in 1982, poll conducted by two historians, Murray and Blessing, that also occurred in 1982, the Arthur Schlesinger Jr (son of Arthur Schlesinger Sr.) in 1996, and a 2005 poll by the Wall Street Journal. The poll conducted by Murray and Blessing was the most sophisticated of these efforts.

In general, there was a strong correlation between the electoral success of a president and his ranking in the polls of historians. Presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt are invariably the top 3 presidents and all were elected at least twice, though Lincoln was assassinated early in his second term. The historian's rankings can change over time, as witnessed by Eisenhower generally getting a higher ranking in later polls. Merry has doubts about the relatively high rankings that historians sometimes give to Presidents Wilson, Truman and especially Hoover. He has a high opinion of Ronald Reagan and expects his ranking to increase in the future. Speculating on the future rankings of recent presidents, he expects Clinton to do pretty well, while George W. Bush and Barack Obama to do badly.

Only for the would-be policy wonk or someone with a strong personal reason to be interested in the national government budget, this book is dedicated

Only for the would-be policy wonk or someone with a strong personal reason to be interested in the national government budget, this book is dedicated to the utopian view that if The People knew more about the budget of the federal government of the United States, they could have more influence on it. A People's Guide to the Federal Budget is informative about the legislative process that is supposed to determine the budget, where the money goes, where it is spent, and some reasons why there are so much argument about the thing. The book also provides advice on how to contact your Representative or Senator(or more likely their staff) for maximum effect. A knowledge of the budget process is helpful here; the book provides a time-line indicating when particular steps in the process are supposed to occur. Numerous charts, usually of the pie variety, illustrate how the money is spent and where it comes from. The last textual portion of the book contains some lesson plans for teachers. Also included towards the end is a breakdown of spending for selected programs by state. The book is well-referenced; there are a bit more than 200 end notes.

I took away the following major points. First, majority of the federal government's spending is on auto-pilot: the majority of the funds spent are spent by manadatory entitlement programs, whose funding does not come up for consideration in the annual budget process. Congress could change the amount spent by these programs, but to do so would require altering the original legislation, such as changing the criteria by which some citizens have the right to enjoy certain programs. Social Security, mostly an income support program for the elderly, and Medicare, the medical program for the elderly, are the major causes of mandatory spending. The book has nice short explanations of the various income transfer programs. Second, the military makes up the larges share of the spending whose levels are determined in the annual budget process, so-called discretionary spending,at 53% of discretionary spending or 20% of the total spending. Third, most of the money comes from individual income taxes (47%) and payroll taxes (36%). Corporate income taxes bring in 8% of the total.

Adam Hochschild sees the British anti-slavery movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries as a remarkable event in the moral imagination of hum

Adam Hochschild sees the British anti-slavery movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries as a remarkable event in the moral imagination of humanity. For what may have been the first time in history, one set of people became convinced that what was happening to another group of people, who didn't look like them, didn't necessarily share their religion, and who didn't live in the same place, was wrong. Even more remarkable is that the labors of the oppressed group provided some of the common comforts enjoyed by the first, such as cotton cloth, coffee, and above all sugar.

The events that lead to the abolishment of the British slave trade and ultimately the abolishment of slavery itself in British colonies can be divided into three categories: public pressure inside Britain, Parliamentary legislation, and slave revolts. Public pressure was expressed in numerous petitions (with many signatures) to Parliament, public meetings, and numerous pamphlets. Before the anti-slavery movement really got started in the 1780s, there was already one group in Britain opposed to slavery. Unfortunately, the Society of Friends, or Quakers, were viewed as a wierd (why, they wouldn't take off their hats in the presence of their numerous social superiors! they let women speak in church!) , unreliable fringe group by most Britons and in particular by the upper-class Anglican men who sat in Parliament. Thus, though the Quakers provided a solid core of activists outside of Parliament, already experienced in activism, some more respectable figures were needed for cover. Fortunately, in Thomas Clarkson, they found an Anglican who not only became a industrious activist and writer of many a pamphlet, but an organizer of great ability. Granville Sharp, an older man who had pressed the legal case that made slavery apparently illegal on the British isles, was another Anglican who joined with the Quakers. The initial goal was to end the Atlantic slave trade to Britain's Caribean colonies, which used slave labor to produce sugar and coffee. The opponents of the anti-slavery movement accurately believed that the ultimate goal of the anti-slavery movement was to end slavery itself.

The legal case that Graham Sharp supported was that brought by James Somerset against Charles Stewart in 1772. Somerset was an escaped slave whose owner, Stewart, had recaptured him. The legalstatus of slavery within Britain was unclear. The judgement granted by Lord Chief Justice Mansfield gave Somerset his freedom. Though the decision was narrowly drawn, nearly everyone, including lower court justices, believed that it had made slavery illegal within Britain itself.

In 1807 the slave trade, but not slavery itself, was made illegal within the British empire. An important prepartory bit of legislation was inspired by the skillful admiralty lawyer James Stephen in 1806, and introduced into Parliament by William Wilberforce, made it illegal for British subjects (including "shipyards, outfillters and insurers from participating in the slave trade to the colonies of France and its allies." As Britain had then been at war for many years with revolutionary and then Napoleonic France, it was difficult to oppose. Furthermore, it split the British plantation owners, who liked the idea of less foreign competiton, from the interests of those involved in the slave trade. Stephens had become an opponent of slavery decades earlier when he moved to the West Indies to set up his law practice (and remove himself from certain romantic entanglements, he attended a trial where 4 slaves were being tried for the murder of a white doctor. The evidence was meager, but the four ment were sentence to be burned alive.

William Wilberforce, the Parliamentary representative of the anti-slavery movement, comes across as the least impressive prominent member of the movement. Despite his many years in Parliament, he never learned from experience and remained a wretched Parliamentary tactician. He never made any generalizations from his fight against slavery to other forms of injustice around him.

There was a decades-long hiatus between the end of the slave trade and the abolition of slavery, partly because the leaders of the anti-slavery movement assumed that without a constant supply of new slaves, the high death rate on the West Indian plantations would result in a rapid end to slavery. However, in the wake of the abolition of the slave trade, the plantation owners adjusted their feeding and treatment of the slaves enough to prevent this outcome. Starting in the 1820s, the anti-slavery movement revived, but would have remained a timid affair except for the women's anti-slavery associations. At a time when the male abolitionists were talking about very gradual emancipation, the women would have none of it and the men eventually had to go along. Women had also been prominent decades earlier in leading a successful boycott of slave-produced sugar. In 1833 legislation abolishing slavery passed Parliament; it went into effect on August 1, 1838.

Nor were women the only outsiders who made an important contribution to the end of slavery. Slave revolts played an important part. The most important revolt was one which resulted in the proclaimation of the Republic of Haiti on January 1, 1804 after a decade of complicated and multi-sided struggle. Although a French colony (St. Domingue), the first European intervention to put down the revolt was by Britisih forces from 1793 to 1798. Only in 1802 did French forces, led by Napoleon's brother-in-law, make an unsuccessful attempt to put down the rebellion. Slave rebellions were occuring in British colonies about the time that abolition of slavery was being debated, and the slaughter of the whites in Haiti decades earlier had not been forgotten by the slave owners.

Although much of the anti-slavery movement's media campaign consisted of statements by white folks, there were materials produced by former slaves. The most well-known is that by Olaudah Equiano, also known as Gustavus Vasa. His 530 page memoir, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vasa the African appeared in the spring of 1789. Equiano was an amazing man, who had succeeded in buying himself out of slavery and who spent much of his working life as a sailor. His memoir was re-discovered in the 1960s and remains available.

Mr. Sonnenfeldt's early life was as full of incident as Voltaire's Candide. He grew up in the east German town of Gardelegen, born in 1923 to a Jewis

Mr. Sonnenfeldt's early life was as full of incident as Voltaire's Candide. He grew up in the east German town of Gardelegen, born in 1923 to a Jewish couple who were both medical doctors. He had a younger brother Hitler's rise gradually made their lives intolerable. In 1937 or 1938 Sonnenfeldt's mother (Gertrud Liebenthal Sonnenfeldt) recalled that an eastern European Jewish family had passed through Gardelegen on their way to America about a decade earlier; she traveled to the United States and got them to sponsor the Sonnenfeldt family to immigrate to the United States. Unfortunately, the United States then proceeded to slam the door shut after the paperwork had been completed. Undaunted, Gertrude then managed to get the boys into a English boarding school, so at least the youngsters were safe. After a scary bit when Richard's father, Walther Herbert Sonnenfeldt, was locked up after Kristallnacht (he was released because he had earned the Iron Cross during World War I, an act that Sonnenfeldt attributes to Gorings episodic sentimentality) the couple were able to go to Sweden. Mr. Sonnenfeldt remained in Britain - only to be locked up as a dangerous German alien sometime after the Second World War started! He eventually was placed on a ship along with other Germans (some civilians like himself, others prisoners of war), with a sadistic prison staff, which turned out to be bound for Australia! The Australians couldn't figure out why he and the civilian Germans had been sent there. After a short stay in Australia, he was taken to India (Bombay, I think) where he was allowed to live an ordinary life and finally was able to contact his parents (who had doubts that he was among the living) who had finally made it to the United States, settling around Baltimore and trying to gain American medical licenses. After working for maybe 2 years as an electrician (Mr. Sonnenfeldt did not want to become a physician) and gaining some college credits through night school at John Hopkins, he was drafted into the army. He served mainly with an armored reconnaissance unit, remaining in Europe after the end of hostilities because he hadn't enough "points" to go back to the United States, and also fortunately not being sent to the far east for the projected invasion of Japan. He was working in a motor pool when he was told to pack his bag for Nuremberg, where he served as an interpreter for the American prosecution.

As an interpreter, Sonnenfeldt translated the verbal responses of such defendents as Goring, Albert Speer, Field Marshall Wilhem Keitel and others during the interrogations held during the legal discovery process. The defendants were rather talkative, apparently because they hoped to throw all the blame on the dead (Hitler, Himmler, etc.), a strategy thwarted do to the massive documentary evidence available to the prosecution. He was present in the courtroom during the trial, but was not one of those wonders who served as the near-instantaneous translators for the court proceedings. His role in court was to check the defendant's statements against those statements they had made before trial. Sonnenfeldt does confirm my previous reading on the relative ineptness of the American prosecution as compared with the British prosecutors.

Most of the book is focused on the Nuremberg trial and Mr. Sonnenfeldt's previous life, just mentioning his postwar career as an engineer at RCA. An important exception, and the cause for the writing of this memoir, are the author's visits to his home town of Gardelegen and Germany more generally starting in the 1990s. The instigation seems to have been Gisela Bunge, a resident of Gardelegen who contacted Sonnenfeldt as part of her project in writing the history of the Jewish population of the town. During one of these visits, one crucial point regarding dictatorships came up: would you have had the courage to resist?

I read the first 77 pages, and also skimmed other portions of the book, which was published in 1990. Less has changed in the interventing 22 years th

I read the first 77 pages, and also skimmed other portions of the book, which was published in 1990. Less has changed in the interventing 22 years than one might expect. Basically, the book is about how the seriously mentally ill (which I think usually means in practice those with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia) ended up homeless rather than in the state mental hospitals which reached their peak populations in 1955. I found it a bit quaint to recall that homelessness used to be a major public issue. Issues of psychiatry, law, and effective drugs all play a part in a complicated story of how the seriously mentally ill were let out of mental hospitals and did not recieve treatment in what the authors rightly and scathingly note is referred to as the "community," said "community" often being at best a single room occupancy hotel. With regard to psychiatry, there was some pyschiatrists in the 1960s who did not believe that there was such a thing as mental illness, which rather limits the scope for involuntary confinement of the mentally ill. In addition, the generally Freudian approach of psychiatrists at the time made them unwilling to advocate drug therapy, instread relying on talk therapy for diseases that are not responsive to such therapy. In addition, a famous article published in the early 1970s in the journal Science brought forth empirical evidence that doctors were rather bad at distinguishing the sane from the insane. I didn't get far enough along to comment much on legal issues discussed. The book is well documented.

I think what really turned me off were some comments (on page 209) by the authors regarding Marilyn Rice, an economist at the Deparetment of Commerce who in 1973 underwent ECT (electroshock therapy for us lay people) for severe depression. The treatment was successful in treating the depression, but Rice's knowledge of economics disappeared; memory loss can be a side-effect of ECT. Rice became generally and publicly opposed to ECT as result of her experience. She took a disability retirement. On page 209 the authors remark that "whatever the effects of ECT on Marilyn Rice's memory fo facts she had learned at the Department of Commerce, it has not interfered with her ability to learn and remember research material on ECT." If I had been forced to leave a job I presumably liked as a result of a side-effect, I too would have been pissed. I think the authors ought to have expressed some compassion for Rice's predicament. That doesn't mean that the authors are wrong to insist that involuntary confinement and involuntary treatment are more humane than letting the mentally ill end up on the streets or in prison. However, I would like sometime to see the advocates of such a position come up with a clear, detailed plan for how this would work, as well some discussion of how to release those sane individuals who would undoubtably be caught up in a bigger net.

The very title, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice,posits that there are serious defects in the system. The problems that the late author, Wil

The very title, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice,posits that there are serious defects in the system. The problems that the late author, William J. Stuntz, sees have a paradoxical relationship to one another. One the one hand, the United States is imprisoning a historically unprecedentedly large proportion of its population, about 500 per 100,000 people. A bit over 2,000,000 people are in prison or jail, primarily the former. The large numbers of cases that are needed to imprison so many people are dealt with by obtaining guilty pleas, usually as a result of a plea bargain, rather than going to trial. 96% of criminal cases are concluded by a guilty plea before trial. Even as recently as the early 1960s the only about two-thirds of cases were resolved by guilty pleas. Simultaneously with the high rate of imprisonment, the clear rate (roughly the proportion of crimes for which suspects are charged) for murders in the poor African-American communities who suffer most from violence is low, about one-third. These neighborhoods simultaneously get too much police attention when it comes to drug crimes, being subject to drug raids and associated searches at a rate greatly disproportionate to the rate of African-American drug use, which appears to be roughly the same as that for whites and Latinos.

The high rate of imprisonment is a recent phenomenon, starting in the early 1970s. This high imprisonment rate is due largely to the backlash against the rising crime rates of the 1950s and 1960s, which took place under conditions where the imprisonment rate was declining outside of the southern United States. No ready explanation exists for the declining imprisonment rate of the 1950s and 1960s; though the Supreme Court’s criminal procedure decisions, such as the Miranda decision, in the 1960s did (only temporarily) make arrests more difficult, the imprisonment rate had been falling and the crime rate increasing for several years before these decisions. The rise in the crime rate is associated with the African-American migration to northern cities after the Second World War. After reaching a peak about 1990, the murder rate declined by about half, which still leaves many American cities more violent than they were about 1950. One question Stuntz raises is if the current level of incarceration is needed to keep levels of violence below their 1990 peak.

American society, at least in some times and places, has not been so violent and has simultaneously locked up far fewer people. During the years between the Civil War and the Great Depression, the cities in the Northeast and mid-west managed to achieve this (the South was violent but didn’t have a large prison population, while the trans-Mississippi west started out violent and then came to resemble the northeast, but with a somewhat higher incarceration rate). The good outcomes in the northeast and Midwest occurred even though there was substantial European immigration to the United States during that era, and even though the immigrants were more violent in their new homes than they had been in Europe, which parallels the jump in crimes committed by African-Americans when they moved from the south to the north. Stuntz attributes the excellent outcome in the northeast to a combination of many cases going to jury, juries whose composition was similar to both the likely victims and perpetrators, a legal doctrine which gave juries wide scope in sentencing based upon the intent of the defendant, and large police forces. Because juries were intentionally given large leeway, the idea that the frequent acquittals were examples of “jury nullification” is not historically sound. As the jurors lived in the same communities as both perpetrators and victims, the jurors had a stake both in deterring crime and in keeping punishment to the minimum necessary.These conditions don’t hold true today. Legal doctrine has changed, with statutory law becoming much more important and much more specific. Statutory law has become broader, in the sense that there are more possible violations (often variations on a single common law notion, but each requiring just enough differences in fact to avoid the appearance if not the reality of double jeopardy). The legal notion of intent has in the process, for most felonies (oddly murder seems an exception to this), been reduced to a tautology; the defendant did it, so he must have intended the outcome. In addition, the increased emphasis on drug crimes, in which the matter of guilt or innocence is basically a matter of whether or not the stuff was in the defendants possession, limits the scope for discussion of intent. However, as only about 20% of state prisoners (about 50% for the much smaller federal system) are in prison for drug crimes, the importance of drug offenses in increasing the prison population should not be overstated. Although juries are generally selected from the particular county in which the crime occurred, they generally don’t resemble the sub-populations from which either the victims or the defendants tend to come.

Stuntz also sees a lost opportunity for a better justice system in the outcome of Reconstruction.

For a brief period, the legal doctrine embodied in the phrase “equal protection of the laws,”, with the emphasis on the words “equal protection,” came close to what a non-lawyer such as myself might think, at least for federal prosecutors when racial matters were involved. This interpretation largely disappeared after Reconstruction, when the emphasis turned toward the end of the phase, “the laws.” If everybody was subject to the same law, no equal protection issues arose, no matter if how these laws were applied varied as function of race, and no matter if some of the laws were applied only to members of one race. I was surprised to learn that allow the outcomes of some of the more infamous Jim Crow era decisions, such as Plessy vs. Ferguson, been overturned, the doctrine behind them often has not.

The legal arguments were a bit hard for me to follow, not being a lawyer. The abstractness of phrases such as “due process” or “equal protection of the laws” (what exactly do these mean?) is difficult for me. What I believe that the author means by “due process” is that every defendant in principle is subject to the same procedures regarding arrest, self-incrimination, trial and appeal. What he means by “equal protection of the laws” seems to be that different groups, in particular defendants of different races, should be arrested and punished at roughly equivalent rates and with roughly equivalent severity. From various comments in the text, I believe that the author would have meant by an “equivalent rate” would be that defendants of different races should be arrested in rough portion to the frequency of a particular crime in their group. As American criminals generally victimize people of the same racial or ethnic group (which I think is very polite of us), and as crime rates are often very different between groups (for example, the rate at which African-Americans are murdered is much higher than that of whites), the result for such a policy for some crimes, such as murder, that different groups would not be represented in the prison population in proportion to what share of the national population they occupy. For other crimes, such as drug possession, where the rates of usage are similar across racial groups, prisoners would be represented roughly in accordance with their share in the national population. With regard to sentencing, equal protection in the author’s view would mean that criminals with similar crimes would have sentences of similar lengths. For example, the current disparity written into Federal law regarding the sentencing of those who have crack cocaine, versus powdered cocaine, would disappear.

The author would also like there to be less emphasis on enforcing drug laws, which he sees as a somewhat unsatisfactory, but easier to enforce, proxy for the enforcement of laws against violent crime, crimes which are difficult to prove in many minority communities. Having read David Simon’s “Homicide”, I think Stuntz underestimates the association between the illegal drug trade and murder. My hunch is that legalization of drugs would reduce murder rate associated with the trade, but I think that it is more debatable whether or not legalization of such “hard” drugs as meth, heroin or cocaine would reduce the total level of human misery.

He would also like to see more cases go to trial, because plea-bargaining reduces the scrutiny that individual cases receive. To change this would seem to require more judges and courts; my impression is that the low ratio of courts to charged offenses makes the judiciary a choke point in the current system. He also notes that as cities and counties pay for the policing but not for the prisons (typically paid for by the state governments), the local governments have an incentive to skimp on policing but little incentive to skimp on prison time.

Edward Luce, a British-born journalist who works for the Financial Times offers a pessimistic appraisal of American politics and economic conditions.Edward Luce, a British-born journalist who works for the Financial Times offers a pessimistic appraisal of American politics and economic conditions. Luce frequently compares trends in the United States to those in China.

Economic well-being for a large majority of the population had been roughly static, or even declining for roughly 35 years prior to the 2008 financial crisis. Events after 2008 have reduced incomes for much of the population, even though the Gross Domestic Product has been slowly growing. Simultaneously China's economy has been growing rapidly, and will probably be larger than that of the United States by 2020, although Chinese per capita income will still a good deal lower.

All of the incentives in the labor market point towards replacing people with machines or employing low paid persons, as Wal-Mart does. Health care costs are especially to blame, but globalization also has some negative effects on income. Luce may slightly over-emphasize manufacturing in my view (the move towards most people being employed in services started in the early 1950s, well before income growth stagnated), but I think he is right to believe that the cumulative effects of too much movement of manufacturing abroad are bad, as all the "higher valued" activities such as research also eventually leave once you stop making stuff. Also, he is right to point out that you can't expect much income growth if you devote your resources to areas such as health care in which there is little productivity growth.

Luce discusses the attempts to increase American economic growth by improving human capital through changes to public education. He finds that the charter schools, increased testing, and linking teacher pay to test scores has had essentially no effect, though we are spending a good deal more money per pupil than we did in the early 1970s. He raises the possibility that we have got the causality backwards, and that it is high incomes that lead to high grades, but focuses more attention on the unwillingness of parents and school districts to do anything that much puncture the self-admiration of their charges, such as giving low grades for poor performance or using challenging materials.

In the chapters devoted to the labor force, he continues this discussion of self-esteem and its detrimental effects. Apparently many young people are not open to criticism of their job performance by their supervisors. In addition, many men, in contrast to most women, are not flexible about taking what low-paid or non-traditional work is available, be it in retail or in the lower-status aspects of health care. At the top of the heap, Ivy League graduates continue to gravitate towards the financial industry; essentially there have been no changes in incentives despite the dramatic events of 2008.

Investment in new technology, science, and infrastructure has also declined. Venture capital funds in silicon valley are relatively meager, and much of the attention of venture capital firms is focused on India or China. Public investments in science through the excessively numerous federal agencies involved (Defense Department, Department of Energy, NASA, etc.) has declined. States and the federal government are spending less on infrastructure, noticeably less as a percentage of GDP than other nations.

Political conditions at the nation's capital contribute to stasis. Most of a politician's time is devoted to money raising or perpetual campaigning, so there is little time for policy making. His discussions of the healthcare law and the Dodd-Frank bill are enlightening. The strong influence of today's large industries in campaign funding and staffing the upper branches of the federal government contibute to maintaining the status quo, making it difficult for new industries, such as solar energy, to win support. Much of the bureaucracy, apparently in a bid to avoid criticism, is devoted to a by the book approach that leads to many columns of regulation added to the federal registrar, regardless of need. The federal government is not particularly well-staffed, as an informal cap of 2,000,000 civil servants has been in place since 1950. Instead, constractors, many picked without open bidding, do much of the work (and their employers contribute to campaign funding).

In comparing the United States with China, Luce tacitly (usually) assumes that relative wealth and income comparisons between nations are important. I would guess that Luce is correct in believing that they are, even in the sense that they have something to do with individual economic well-being, as he has many historical examples in which mercantilist policies have resulted in economic growth. However, he could have made most of his points without reference to another country, because for many Americans economic conditions are actually declining.

One aspect that Luce could have devoted more time to how often the United States has been at war since roughly the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Although the wars in Afghanistan and the second Iraq war committed more forces or lasted much longer than most of the other conflicts, it seems to me that between the invasion of Panama, the first Gulf war, the incursion into Somalia, the no-fly zones over Iraq maintained throughout the 1990s, and the Balkan wars, that the United States has spent more time at war than at peace in the last 22 years. Given Luce's discussion of the undesirable behaviors common in national politics, I would have thought that the reasons behind this nearly continual record of war would have merited considerable discussion in the chapters devoted to national politics. Although comparatively few Americans have been killed in these wars, relative to past conflicts, the recent wars cost a lot of money, required a constant high level of preparation, and presumably took a lot of politicians time. Consequently the resources, material and mental, devoted to these wars, resources which presumably could have been used for private or public investments instead, could presumably explain some of the undesirable economic trends ...more

In October 1859, John Brown and a small, multi-racial group of his followers occupied parts of the federal armory and arsenal in Harper's Ferry, VirgiIn October 1859, John Brown and a small, multi-racial group of his followers occupied parts of the federal armory and arsenal in Harper's Ferry, Virginia (now in West Virginia). In the next few hours they took some hostages and freed some of the slaves of hostages (one of whom had a family connection to George Washington). Despite considerable confusion, the local townspeople and local Virginia militia quickly surrounded the raiders in the buidings they occupied - a detail about which I had been previously unaware. U. S. army officer Robert E. Lee, assisted by Jeb Stuart, then crushed the resistance with a few score Marines. Most of those raiders who were not already killed were captured and hanged a few months later after trials in Virginia courts. A few members of Brown's party, mainly those who were in Maryland waiting to bring up supplies, survived the events.

John Brown had previously become notorious for several killings of pro-slavery men in Kansas, during the period when there was conflict in that territory over the issue of slavery being legal once it became a state, an issue which thanks to Senator Douglas of Illinois was left up to the citizens of the territory.

One question is what exactly Brown hoped to achieve in Harper's Ferry. His previous plans had generally suggested a vast raid to free slaves; but his immobility once he occupied parts of the armory and arsenal are inconsistent with this plan. Horwitz makes the reasonable suggestion that the raid was intended as a combination suicide mission and publicity stunt, designed to increase tension between the north and south to spark a conflict over slavery. The one point I would make against this hypothesis is that if that is all that Brown wanted to accomplish, it was unnecessary to stockpile all those pikes, revolvers and carbines in preparation for the raid. Perhaps Brown himself was of two minds regarding his plans.

Brown's raid probably made it easier for succession to occur upon the election of Lincoln, by changing people's attitudes. Southern politicians often took Brown's raid, and the sympathy he received from many in the north, as evidence that northern opinion was really uncompromisingly abolitionist.

The narrative's pace can be a slow, mainly because Horwitz writes about what Brown was doing before he became a violent anti-slavery activist. Overall, I enjoyed the book....more

The court of George II of England, both before & after he became king, socially resembled a better-dressed and more formal middle school. Thus itThe court of George II of England, both before & after he became king, socially resembled a better-dressed and more formal middle school. Thus it probably resembled most royal courts when actual money and power were at issue. The first three Hanovarian kings were perhaps the last British monarchs with these assets at their disposal, though Parliament was chipping away at the power of the court.

Most of the events took place at Kennsington Palace; murals along a staircase show many of the actual servants, both servant servants and artistocratic servants. The ar Worsley chooses her subjects from among those featured. Influence (and hence power and wealth) were generally proportional to how close you were to the monarchs. Consequently, aristocrats competed for jobs whose duties included holding the basin of water while the Queen cleaned her teeth.

Central to the psychodramas are George and Queen Caroline. George lacked the sublety and appetite for spin desirable in a courtier. Caroline was generally successful in providing the public relation skills he lacked. These skills were useful when George II was at odds with his father, George I (the first Hanovarian king, brought in from Germany to avoid having to select one of the legitimate but Catholic Stuarts after the death of Queen Anne). They were less helpful when the same conflicts arose between George II and his own children. These conflicts resulted from the current monarch and the monarch to be competing for influence; the current monarch could promise current positions, the heir could provide jobs upon the death of the current monarch.

Adding to the difficulties was that George and Caroline actually loved each other. This most unroyal circumstance could make the job (and job it was) of being the King's mistress even more fraught than one might expect....more

President James Garfield was relieved from the need to confront the issue of civil service reform when Charles Giteau shot him at the Baltimore and PoPresident James Garfield was relieved from the need to confront the issue of civil service reform when Charles Giteau shot him at the Baltimore and Potomac train station in Washington, D. C. on July 2, 1881. Although Giteau is usually described as a disappointed office seeker (he wanted to be appointed to a diplomatic post in France), this description overlooks the fact that he had nothing material to get Garfield elected and thus had no reason to expect an appointment. As Giteau generally believed that anything he wanted to do was God's command, he generally deemed minor earthly obstacles unimportant.

The two bullets Giteau shot into Garfield would not themselves have killed the president. One went through an arm, another one came to rest in his abdomen without hitting the spinal cord, important organs, or a major blood vessel (though it did make a hole in a vertebrae). Rather, Garfield died a slow death (he lasted for many weeks) from infections caused by his doctors unwillingness to use the asceptic technique pioneered some years previously by the British surgeon Joseph Lister when they probed Garfield's wounds. Dr. D. Willard Bliss, who had also treated Lincoln, seems to have been the chief malefactor here. Alexander Bell worked hard (but as it turns out, irrelevantly) to develop a sort of metal detector to find the bullet lodged in Garfield's abdomen. As however Bliss "knew" the bullet was on the side that (as found out at autopsy) it wasn't, the device was never used in the appropriate location. Bell did further develop the device and it was useful in the following decades, until supplanted by x-ray imaging.

In the aftermath of the shooting, there was open speculation in the press that Garfield's political nemesis, former New York Senator Roscoe Conkling, and perhap's Garfield's vice-president Chester Arthur(!), who was a crony of Conklings, had put Giteau up to it. Conkling was a defender of the spoils system, the wholesale replacement of the federal government's personnel after each election to allow for the appointment of ones supporters. He favored this for a very good reason; Conkling had been allowed to decide on the appoitments to the custom's office in New York City, which in those days brought in the majority of the federal government's revenue. Chester Arthur had previously been appointed to the New York custom's office, and then removed upon suspicion of dubious financial doings associated with his position.

Ironically, upon becoming president, Chester Arthur suceeeded in passing a civil service reform bill, reducing the number of political appointees.

Garfield appears to have been a charming and scholarly man, who deserved better than being shot by a crazy guy.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was founded by President Theodore Roosevelt in the early years of theI read the kindle editon of this book.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was founded by President Theodore Roosevelt in the early years of the twentieth century, though it didn't get its current name until the Presidency of his cousin Franklin Delano Rooosevelt (FDR). From the 1920s until his death in the early 1970s, it was led by J. Edgar Hoover.

Weiner's history of the FBI focuses on its role in countering espionage, subversion, and terrorism (or what its leaders deemed to fall into these categories). Very little attention is devoted to organized crime or other more ordinary criminal activities.

J. Edgar Hoover rose to prominence for his role in deporting various sorts of leftists in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. One lesson Hoover learned from this experience was to avoid court cases and focus on gathering intelligence and harassing his enemies with extra-legal means, such as causing conflict within the ranks.

Under FDR, Hoover gained de facto if illegal freedom to use wire taps and burglarize left-wing and right-wing organizations deemed subversive (Hoover was more enthusiastic about moving against the left-wing groups) and the diplomatic posts of other nations.

Hoover had a negative attitude towards the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Weiner argues that although this was partly due to Hoover's 1895 birth and residence in Washington D. C., a southern city in a social sense, it was mainly because one of Martin Luther King's main associates had been a Communist Party member. President Lyndon Baines Johnson did succeed in cajoling Hoover into successfully using against the Klan the same techniques of wiretapping, recruting informant, and sowing conflict that the FBI had used against the Communist Party.

The FBI was less successful in persuing the Weather Underground and Puerto Ricans using terrorism in an attempt to gain independence. Starting in the late 1960s, Hoover became less amenable to White House pressure to use his favorite techniques against political enemies of the President, causing Richard Nixon no end of consternation. The FBI in general and Mark Felt in particular was the major media source on the Watergate scandal. The repercussions of Watergate, including the exposure of the illegal means used by the FBI, resulted in a considerable reduction in counterintelligence and counter-terrorism operations, a change which persisted into the 1990s.

From the mid-1970s until about 2001, the FBI and American intelligence organizations in general suffered from a number of undiscovered double agents in their midst. Aside from the Soviet Union and its Russian successor, the Chinese and the Cubans appear to have run successful operations against the United States. FBI leadership was uneven during this period, with a low point under director Sessions. Louis Freeh, the director during most of the Clinton administration, had a poor relationship with the White House during most of this period, reaching a low point during the Monica Lewinsky episode and subsequent impeachment trial.

During the 1990s and even after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the FBI was hampered by poor organization and bad computer systems in using the knowledge it collectively held. The increase in information recieved by the FBI,from such electronic survelliance organizations such as the National Security Agency as well as the Central Intelligence Agency, in some ways made things worse by providing many more false leads. At the same time there was conflict within the government, and later outside of government after the news leaked, about some of the means by which information was collected, including electronic survillance without court warrant, and torture. The FBI, CIA, and the military did improve in their identification and killing of terrorists, though contraversy about the means used continues....more

During the Second World War, German and Finnish forces cut off the land routes to Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, for 17 months starting in September 1During the Second World War, German and Finnish forces cut off the land routes to Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, for 17 months starting in September 1941. At the beginning of the siege, there were over 3 million Soviet citizens inside this area, most of them civilians. Some supplies could be brought in over Lake Lagoda to the east, particularly when the lake froze over.

Surrounding and bombarding, rather than occupying, Leningrad suited Hitler and his generals, who preferred not to have to feed the inhabitants. Hitler's postwar plans included the razing of Moscow and Leningrad anyway. So the Germans dropped bombs and shelled Leningrad to the best of their ability to help along the dying process. The Finnish forces seem to have basically occupied the land to the northwest of the city; Finnish participation in the Second World War was revenge for the earlier (1940, I think) Soviet invasion of Finland.

That so many people, especially civilians, were in Leningrad was due to the short-sightedness of the Soviet leaders, who concentrated on evacuating factories not people from the advancing Germans.

The majority of the deaths in Leningrad happened during the winter of 1941-42. At least 600,000 people died, mostly from starvation. The rations for those who were not soldiers or heavy manual workers were not sufficient to sustain life, even if you got what the rations were supposed to entitle you to. There would not have been enough food to go around for all under any circumstances during this winter, but the favoritism (never was a high rank in the Communist Party more useful) and stealing of supplies (few of those in the food processing factories or supply system died from hunger) made things worse. Also making things worse was a lack of electrical power, working sewers, and heat during an unusually cold winter.

During the winter of 1941-42 Stalin decided that a major evacuation of the civilians was needed. This evacuation was implemented before the winter of 1942-43, reducing the population to about 600,000 in the besieged area. A fuel pipeline was laid along the bottom of Lake Lagoda, increasing power availability. And an experienced population starting growing food wherever possible. Combined with a more normal winter, all of this allowed for adequate rations during the winter of 1942-43 and subsequently.

Hunger had bad effects on both the morals and physique of the inhabitants. People started suspecting their family members of stealing their food; and they were often right. Watching other people eat could be intolerable. People often used their connections to qualify for better rations than they were entitled to, tried to become associated with institutions that ran a well-provided cafeteria, kept using as long as possible the ration cards of recently deceased family members, and in extreme cases engaged in cannibalism. Physical symptoms of hunger included a swelling of the limbs, a drastic change in ones complextion, and extreme difficulty in walking short distances. Those who died of starvation had not only no body fat, but their hearts and livers had drastically decreased in mass.

Reid quotes extensively from the diaries of many persons who experienced the siege (not all of them survived it). A majority of these informants are women, and most of those quoted are writers or academics. One German soldier is quoted. She neatly integrates these accounts into her narrative. I found her book to be excellent. ...more

There were five pivotal individuals in the production of the original Volkswagen: Ferdinand Porsche the designer, William Bernbach the creative directThere were five pivotal individuals in the production of the original Volkswagen: Ferdinand Porsche the designer, William Bernbach the creative director and partner at the American advertising firm Doyle Dane Bernbach, Ivan Hirst the British Army engineering officer who got production started after World War II, Heinrich Nordhoff the Volkswagen executive most responsible for getting mass production started after Ivan Hirst's start, and Adolf Hitler. Ferdinand Porsche, born in 1875, had for decades wanted to produce a European equivalent to Ford's Model T, a car nearly anyone could afford. Until Hitler came along and established a government enterprise (and a new town, now known as Wolfsburg but originally as something the Town of the Strength Through Joy Car) the idea had never gotten anywhere. Though the factory was completed in the early years of World War Two, production of Volkswagens was rendered impractical by the war, though a sort of German jeep was manufactuered using much of the design. It was not obvious that the plant would survive after the German defeat, as there were some among the allies who thought that a de-industrialized Germany was for the best. The British tended not to share this view, and Hirst started low volume production, mainly for British army use in Germany. Nordhoff, a former Opel executive, was brought in later in the 1940s (he remained the leading executive until the late 1960s) and as economic conditions improved in Germany started mass production. Until Doyle Dan Bernbach created an innovative ad campaign in the late 1950s, American sales were slow. Though production of the original Beetle ceased in Germany in the late 1970s, production continued in Brazil and Mexico into the 21st century.

I gave this book a relatively low rating for two reasons. First, the author seems to bring in extraneous material and get off topic. Second, there were times when I thought either some fact checking was needed, or possibly she made overly broad statements. I give two examples. On page 176, she writes that "The use of forced labor spread quickly throughout Germany as Nazi forces captured ever more foreign towns and brough people back from them to work in their German plants; this was a common practice during the Second World War, not only for Germany but also for the Allied countries." I'm not aware that this was a common practice for the Allies, though I wouldn't be suprised if the Soviet Union is an exception. On page 284, referring to post-war events, she writes "Though the Marshall Plan would be extended to the Axis powers as well, the Soviets did not stretch out their hands, but rather created their own plan for the Eastern Bloc, the Molotov Plan (what eventually became COMECON)." This sentence makes it sound like the Soviet Union was on the Axis (German) side of the war.

Despite the above reservations, there was much of the book I enjoyed....more

Let me preface my remarks by pointing out that I am not a firearms enthusiast and that my experience with them is limited to the brief use of a 12 gauLet me preface my remarks by pointing out that I am not a firearms enthusiast and that my experience with them is limited to the brief use of a 12 gauge shotgun.

Despite the what a literal reading of the title might imply, the semiautomatic (mainly) pistols of this manufactuer are mainly made in Austria, though some are now assembled in the United States in the Atlanta area. I believe what the title is meant to imply is that the Glock, more particularly the 9mm caliber Glock 17, either caused or coincided with a change in America's handgun buying habits. Before about the time the Glock began being sold in the United States, most American police forces generally provided a revolver as the standard weapon. In the late 1980s the Federal Bureau of Investigation was involved in a horrific shotout with a couple of well-armed bank robbers in which several FBI agents died. This event gained wide publicity, and the deaths of the agents was blamed, to an unreasonable degree, on the FBI being outgunned.

Individually, the bullets from a semiautomatic handgun are not necessarily more lethal than those from a revolver; it depends on the caliber, ammunition, and so forth. But semiautomatics do generally have more bullets in their magazines than revolvers have in their chambers, and semiautomatic pistols can also be reloaded more quickly than revolvers can.

Glock came to America at the right time to sell to police departments who felt themselves outgunned. The company had a good product, good prices, and an innovative sales force. An example of the latter is their application of a tried and true sales technique to the police gun market; the trade-in. Yes, Glock would significantly reduce the price of a lot of new pistols in return for a police departments older weapons, which it (Glock) would then resell to a wholesaler who would then sell the weapons on the secondhand market. This strategy also came in handy when in the late 1990s a number of cities attempted to sue gun manufactuers for what were deemed the social costs of their product; a number of the cities that complained about guns on the street had been happy enough to add to the number of guns on the street through this trade in offer. Glock also used more traditional sales strategies, such as taking its largely male customers to Atlanta's finest strip club on the last day of a several day training course.

The weapon(s) itself were innovative when the first Glocks came on the market in the 1980s. Much of the exterior of a Glock pistol is a plastic which is lighter and more resistant to corrosion than steel. Despite some misleading 1980s headlines, there is enough metal in a Glock to set off a properly adjusted and tended airport metal detector.Glock pistols have relatively few parts, which results in higher reliability. The competition, especially the American competition, was slow to catch up. As Glock changed the offerings in the American handgun market, this is a second sense in which the Glock is America's gun.

Gaston Glock, the developer, is not the person you would expect to have developed an innovative firearm. In the early 1980s, when the first model was developed, his main job was working at automobile radiator factory and he ran a small machine shop on the side. This machine shop made curtain rods(!) and more pertinantly had also been manufactuering knives for the Austrian army. When he learned that the army was looking for a new side arm, he went to work, learned about fire arms, and successfully bid on the project.

He was lucky in that an American seller of European guns, Karl Walter, sought out Glock on a visit to Vienna and became the marketer of the weapon in the United States. Glock also benefited from the unintended side effects of such legislation as the assault rifle ban. The American market became the largest buyer of Glock pistols.

Glock needed a good product and good luck in the last few years, because there has been many alarming events in the executive suite. Karl Walter was fired when his compensation (a percentage of the sales) was deemed too high. Gaston Glock suffered considerable injuries in 1999 when Charles Marie Ewert, the Luxemburg citizen he had hired to shelter his company from American and Austrian taxes, was involved in an attempt to murder him. Two senior lawyers at Glock's American headquarters, Paul Jannuzzo and Peter Manown, were accused of defrauding the company through an insurance scam. And wealth turned the once shy Gaston Glock into an imperious, suspicious person. ...more

Jeffery Sachs, an economist at Columbia University, is worried about the state of America. He sees a nation in which incomes for many have been stagna

Jeffery Sachs, an economist at Columbia University, is worried about the state of America. He sees a nation in which incomes for many have been stagnant since the 1970s in real (inflation-adjusted) terms, increasing income inequality, a chronic budget deficit and resulting increase in government debt, increased poverty, crumbling infrastructure, and an unwillingness to deal with climate change.

The Price of Civilization is a well documented book with end notes and a list of sources consulted, as well as a guide to further reading. The body of the text contains many charts, often comparing the United States with other wealthy nations. Sachs also cites much opinion survey data.

Sachs appears to be an unusual figure, a liberal non-Keynesian. He appears to believe that attempts to stimulate economic growth through increased government deficit spending will fail. Although I was aware of the converse of Sachs, conservative Keynesian economists such as Gregory Mankiw at Harvard and John B. Taylor at Stanford, Sachs was a new category in my taxonomy of economists.

Sachs blames our lack of response to these problems indirectly to a public too distracted by mass media to pay serious attention to politics, and more directly to the dominance of a small number of powerful lobbies representing the financial, health care, and defense industries. Other contributing factors include the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, which resulted in the Republican Party becoming dominant in the Sunbelt, and the relative increase in the population of Sunbelt states.

Apparently the main way out of this sad state of affairs is for Americans to bestir themselves and become better women and men, focusing less on accumulating material goods and more on the common good. Fortunately for Sachs, the survey data he cites indicates that they share his values. I have some doubts about this, partly because the views of voters rather than the general public is more important and not necessarily the same, and partly because I suspect people are rather more willing to say they are in favor of government spending when they are not confronted with the bill, In any case, it appears that the increased “mindfulness” of the American population is supposed to result in public campaign financing, the provision of free media time, ban campaign contributions from lobbying firms, and shut the revolving door from government to interested firms (pages 244-245.) I wonder how much of this would be deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court. Sachs says he has been told in the past in his work in other countries that such changes were politically impossible (and were then enacted) but I wonder how many of those nations were under the gun of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, or some other creditor.

His main budget policies would appears to be a reduction in military spending, an increase in domestic discretionary spending on research in renewable energy and on maintaining and improving our infrastructure. He would change the Obama health care legislation by either adding a government plan or moving towards a single payer plan – I’m not clear which. Other goals would be to increase the percentage of Americans in their late 20s with a bachelor’s degree to 50% by 2020, improving test scores (I assume for high school students) relative to other rich nations, and bringing unemployment down to 5% by 2015. To do all this, federal taxes would increase from about 18% of gross domestic product (GDP) to about 24% of GDP. Part of the increase in taxes would be used to funding programs at the state and local level, as Sachs believes that leaving taxation to local or state governments encourages a “race to the bottom” among these entities. Sachs does not believe that the Medicare or social security programs offer much scope for budget cutting without harming the beneficiaries.

I have reservations about some of Sachs goals and themes. I have doubts about his goal of increasing the percentage of people with bachelor’s degrees and more importantly about his proposal to do so by increasing financial support for students. From my reading of Crazy U: one dad’s crash course in getting his kid into college by journalist Andrew Ferguson, it would appears that increasing financial aid merely results in a quick dollar for dollar increase in tuition, leaving students where they were before. From my reading of Launching the Innovation Renaissance: a new path to bring smart ideas to market fast by the economist Alex Tabarrok, it would appear that we have gotten more people with bachelor’s degrees in the last few decades, but they have been in non-technical areas which don’t make the recipients of these degrees much better off financially and which don’t contribute to increased technical innovation, a useful way of increasing economic growth. Therefore, I don’t think that merely having more people go to college is useful. Given our poor high school graduation rate, discussed in Tabarrok’s book, I think improving that would be a better first step. I also suspect that Sach’s support of government supported job training is misplaced in the American context, where actual training seems rather uncommon; see Gordon Lafer’s the job training charade.Sachs places much hope in the Millennial Generation, those between 18 and 29, supporting his policy views. He cites polling data suggesting that they are more tolerant on issues such as gay rights, and that they support “a bigger government providing more services” (p. 254.) He also notes that the proportion of African-Americans and Hispanics is larger in this age group. Aside from the last point, which may offer some hope for Sachs to the extent that African-Americans and Hispanics are more likely to be poor and thus may believe that they are more likely to benefit from government programs, I find this argument unconvincing when it comes to economic issues. My impression is that people are willing that they are in favor of something (such as steps to ameliorate climate change) as long as they aren’t actually faced with the bill; then they oppose such measures.

The railroads were tied up in bureaucracy and price controls after the Interstate Commerce Commission was given more power in the early 1900s. This waThe railroads were tied up in bureaucracy and price controls after the Interstate Commerce Commission was given more power in the early 1900s. This was bad enough, but worse, the automobile was becoming popular about the same time. Furthermore, from about 1916 roads got federal funding, which meant that truckers got a subsidized pathway while railroads, electric trolleys and electric interurban trains (a sort of souped up trolley, apparently) had to pay for their own infrastructure. Furthermore, the railroads, trolleys and interurbans had all gotten into a great deal of debt. I found the writing style a bit tedious and gave up after the chapter on General Motors involvement in shutting down electric trolley lines and substituting buses. Witdoubting that automobile users and truckers didn't pay the full price of the costs of newly paved roads they used, I cannot but recall that the railroads got lots of free land from the federal and also some state governments. Consequently, I am unsure which industries got the greater subsidy. I don't doubt that giving the interstate commerce commission control over prices just as automibiles become common was unfortunate, and that the commission should have been abolished earlier. ...more

The subject of Divided Highways is broader than the subtitle implies, as it also sses federal aid for road building before Eisenhower's initiation of

The subject of Divided Highways is broader than the subtitle implies, as it also sses federal aid for road building before Eisenhower's initiation of the interstate highway program. Tom Lewis is also the author of Empire of the Air: the men who made radio a book I enjoyed more than the present one. After a long period in the nineteenth century in which the federal government did nothing to fund road construction, federal support for road construction was discussed from the late nineteenth century and began to be funded under the Wilson administration. From the Wilson administration to the beginning of the Eisenhower administration, Thomas Harris MaDonald was the chief of the Bureau of Roads and the main road construction advocate in the federal government. He worked closely with state highway departments to adopt common standards, make sure roads connected at state borders, and of course help fund construction. He also established a strong research program into how roads should be constructed. MaDonald was opposed to toll roads and also didn't see much need for limited access highways, which may be why he was required to retire early in the Eisenhower administration. Still, the routes of many interstates reflect his influence. Lewis criticizes McDonald for being too reactive, and points out that he ignored the possibility that limited access toll roads would encourage more driving, thereby raising the toll money needed to pay off their construction. The Pennsylvania Turnpike in the early 1940s demonstrated this possibility.

Eisenhower's highway program was motivated partly by his wish to have a large stimulus program on hand in case the economy went into recession, and partly for military purposes, as well improving transportation. After much to and fro in Congress, the gas tax was raised to fund construction. That the federal government was picking up 90% of the cost encourged states to get on board. Construction was generally uncontraversial in rural areas, but could be highly contraversial (often for good reasons) in cities. Lewis nicely describes the resistance put up in New Orleans to putting in an interstate that would have been adjacent to Jackson Square. The events in New Orleans were in essence a conflict within the city, between business leaders (who favored the interstate) and those who wanted to preserve the character of the French Quarter. Although the business leaders of New Orleans were the initiators of the project, they had no difficulty in getting the federal government to go along. In general, interstate routes within cities had a notable tendency to be constructed through the former neighborhoods of the poor and black.

One question that occured to me, but that the author did not raise, was the possibility that the United States would have ended up with a system of limited access highways in the absence of federal funding. This appears to be a real possibility to me; Lewis indicates that several states, such as New York, Ohio, and Indiana, were buidling limited access toll roads, on the Pennsylvania model, before the Eisenhower program. Perhaps if the states were spending more of their own money, they might have been greater care in what roads were built. No doubt it would have taken longer and have resulted in a patchier system.

Why only 2 stars? I got tired of hearing about how the interstate had homogenized America and made it more ugly. It may well be true (I'm sure the first part is), but I've heard it all before. I don't believe, based on what Lewis wrote, that the interstates killed passenger railroad service, because he says it went into a notable decline in the 1920s. Perhaps one might fairly blame building paved roads in general.